OAuth2 email failing to authenticate - RESOLVED!

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RDaneel
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OAuth2 email failing to authenticate - RESOLVED!

Post by RDaneel »

Using the 2nd Build By Bill(tm) from December 26 (and now also the build from December 27) on Windows 11 Pro... after a Seamonkey update earlier last night - after which things seemed to be working - I did a full shutdown of my computer, as we are expecting extremely high winds with the risk of power failures.

This morning, on starting SM, I am unable to connect to my Microsoft email account using SM and OAuth2, getting the dreaded "unable to authenticate: unknown user or bad password" - Retry does nothing, and entering my password again still fails.

Note that there is nothing wrong with the MSFT account/servers, as access through the Outlook Web client still works fine, with no changes to any login information - and shows a goodly amount of email waiting to be downloaded through POP3 and Seamonkey.

This is, of course, troubling, and I notice there is also a report here of passwords not being retrieved and entered in auto-fill fields - possibly related?

Additional data point: GMail, which also demands OAuth2 these days, appears to work fine from the SM email client.

OK, bad news (sort of): I uninstalled the "Bill" build and installed the latest official... same exact symptom. :(

I would like to hear any comment or thoughts from frg, as this makes me really worried that it is an issue at the MSFT end, which further concerns me because they have been on a tear lately to force the use of MFA for logins... this already happened on my Web access to my email, and I suppose my concern here is that the SeaMonkey email client [presumably] has no infrastructure to support MFA.
Last edited by RDaneel on January 4th, 2023, 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

All right, this is interesting - and worthy of a new reply to myself. ;)

This morning, immediately after doing my usual resume-from-sleep, my SM client happily downloaded all 27+ messages sitting on the MSFT servers... but it STILL gets this message when I try to force it to check for and download new messages:

"Sending of password for user <me>@<mydomain>.onmicrosoft.com did not succeed. Mail server outlook.office365.com responded: Authentication failure: unknown user name or bad password."

(email address details obviously altered to protect the guilty/innocent)

That sure looks like a "code/logic" issue in SeaMonkey to me - whether it counts as a bug might be open to debate but there are clearly different code paths in use, one working, one not.

EDIT 12/29/2022: exact same behavior - with newest "nightly" build of 2.53.16 - I do get all email sitting on the MSFT POP3 server, but ONLY when my system resumes from a sleep... come on, folks, this is really strange, as there is clearly something different about how the mail retrieval is functioning (or not) when SM is running on a system just waking up from being suspended.

I obviously could get my email be suspending my system each time I want it, but that does seem more than a bit weird... are there really no comments on what I now need to call a breakage in SM?

EDIT 12/30/2022: exact same behavior - with newest "nightly" build of 2.53.16 (same build as previous, from 12/30/22) - I do get all email sitting on the MSFT POP3 server, but ONLY when my system resumes from a sleep...

It is great to see all the community support on an issue that makes SeaMonkey close to unusable for me...
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Friendly Troll
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Joined: July 15th, 2004, 12:42 am
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by Friendly Troll »

Hello RDaneel.

I am sorry I can't help you with your actual problem. But I might be able to help you with the lack of response.
It's bad tactics to add new info as edits to old posts. After your edits, in the topic list it still says number of replies is 1 and last post is from Dec 28. So if you look there it seems as nothing new has happened in the thread.
This post of mine will bump the thread though
Every person is unique, except for me.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

Thanks, Friendly Troll - I had considered this issue, and concluded it was in poor taste to continually reply to your own thread... I would reconsider that view if I thought it might help.

Perhaps both of our replies will provide some more visibility.

I had always thought it would eventually be browser incompatibility - as big players like Google roll their own new versions of HTML and leave purely conformant browsers looking like they don't work properly - when for me, the end may come from SM's email client ceasing to function. :?
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

Updated to the "new Year's Eve" Build By Bill(tm) last night, but still being greeted by all of my previous day's emails when I wake up my system the last two mornings, while being unable to get any of these downloaded when they actually come in to the MSFT servers during the day, so no change there... :(

I did have a moment of drama when sending an [SMTP] email out, as I also use MSFT severs for this - and these, of course, are also using OAuth2. The connection was made quickly as usual, with a pause for so long during authentication that I was expecting the same problem seen with the POP3 server - but it eventually decided I was who I said I was. ;)

So the SeaMonkey problem with fetching my email remains.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

... and another 2 days of non-functioning SeaMonkey email have gone by - well, mostly non-functioning, as I still get all of yesterday's emails when I wake my machine from sleep in the mornings.

But, of course, that can't really be considered "functioning", can it? I first posted about this breakage a week ago, seeking assistance, and have dutifully installed every new "nightly" build since then... but nothing has changed: SM is still broken, and no comments at all from the overworked and barely existent dev team. :(

To recap the facts, for those that haven't been following this saga:

A week ago, I started getting this when asking to retrieve new email from the MSFT servers using OAuth2:

"Sending of password for user <me>@<mydomain>.onmicrosoft.com did not succeed. Mail server outlook.office365.com responded: Authentication failure: unknown user name or bad password."

While this seems to be a Bad Thing(tm), the other three data points are really interesting, and point to something in the SM email client now not being able to properly negotiate the OAuth2 handshake - but ONLY when it is going through the "normal" code path and circumstances... because when I need the OAuth2 credentials to be used in three other cases, all is good:

1) When I send mail out using the MSFT SMTP server, still using OAuth2 - this WORKS

2) When I wake my system from its overnight "S3 sleep state", all of my email from the last day is downloaded


3) When I access the GMail POP3 server, also using OAuth2 authentication, everything [still] works

This qualifies as a breakage... whatever changes in either SeaMonkey's or MSFT's handling of OAuth2 transactions, POP3 email fetching is clearly not workable now.

If I wanted to do Web-based email like so many do, I could - but I prefer the classic POP3 style of email handling, and have enjoyed SeaMonkey's email client supporting this for 2 decades now - going back to when the "Mozilla" open-source version of the Netscape Communicator suite (which I had been using) first showed up.
Last edited by RDaneel on January 3rd, 2023, 3:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
hardys
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by hardys »

Have you tried a version prior to Dec 26 to check, if everything works with the older version? Or can you remember the last functioning version.

Could be helpful.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

Thanks for asking - but unfortunately, as I mention in the "bad news (sort of)" portion late in my initial post, I tried the actual SM *release*, which is clearly older than the "nightly" builds from Bill - now I just take Bill's builds as soon as I see them.

That is basically why this is uglier (probably) than just a recent SM email change that can be backed out or adjusted... it feels more like something specific to MSFT's OAuth2 setup and *exactly* how we use it.

Why our email client is still able to:

1) get my emails once a day BUT ONLY just after being woken up from an S3 sleep state

2) happily use the MSFT SMTP servers *with* my OAuth2 credentials

3) get email from GMail using their POP3 interface *and* my OAuth2 credentials with them

... is still a really weird mystery - clearly, our code handling OAuth2 authentication is not [completely] wrong.
hardys
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by hardys »

As nobody else seems to have this problem, it could be a problem with your settings.
Have you tried to set up this mail account from scratch by deleting this mail account with all settings and passwords stored. As it is setup as an IMAP account you should not lose any mails.
I recommend a full backup of your current profile before doing so.
TPR75
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by TPR75 »

hardys wrote:Have you tried to set up this mail account from scratch by deleting this mail account with all settings and passwords stored. As it is setup as an IMAP account you should not lose any mails.
If that's IMAP account it could be better to create new profile within SeaMonkey (old will not be deleted) and test it with default settings. If it will work then user can compare settings and maybe it will help.

With "-no-remote" switch it is possible to run both profiles at the same time.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

I am not sure where anyone got the idea this is an IMAP account... I do not care to use email that way, and never have.

What is the case, however, is that my email providers, like MSFT currently and the one before them as well, do temporarily have my emails (which I will "consume" through a POP3 portal) visible on their servers... as guided by my settings in SeaMonkey email, those are deleted once they have been downloaded to me.

Given that the SeaMonkey email client 8 days ago started spontaneously being unable (in the general case) to authenticate with those servers, I am now forced to use an Outlook Web client to see them - or wait until tomorrow morning. ;)

Whether this is technically "the same" as IMAP or merely operationally equivalent I will leave to experts...

I have made zero settings changes, and the only "changes" that happen are my downloading and installing every single "nightly" 64-bit Windows Build By Bill(tm) that I see - which is, of course, why I initially assumed a change just checked into our source tree was responsible for the issue... but since that isn't the reason, I can only assume some change at the MSFT end which interacts "unfortunately" with our email client's OAuth2 implementation. :(

Finally, and not that anyone wants to hear this, but ONCE last night, shortly before putting my system into sleep state, I tried getting new emails from the SM client - and it worked, ONCE... it wouldn't repeat, reverting to the usual behavior of the last 8 days

"Sending of password for user <me>@<account>.onmicrosoft.com did not succeed. Mail server outlook.office365.com responded: Authentication failure: unknown user name or bad password."
TPR75
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by TPR75 »

RDaneel wrote:I am not sure where anyone got the idea this is an IMAP account...
Maybe because I saw this in last post before mine... #-o

Try to search for problems with Thunderbird and OAuth2:
https://www.google.pl/search?q=microsof ... rd+problem

Examples:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1313907

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answe ... uthen.html

https://uit.stanford.edu/service/office ... ird-oauth2

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/co ... 2_against/

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mso ... 27c09a525e

Of course, make some corrections for your POP3 account.
RDaneel
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Re: OAuth2 email failing to authenticate

Post by RDaneel »

Well, the nightmare may be over... ;)

I was sitting reading a news story when my SeaMonkey "you've got new emails!" toast popped up, and not only had it fetched everything still sitting in my [remote] inbox on the MSFT servers, I was able to ask right away again if there was anything there, and the OAuth2 handshake didn't fail! :)

I made no changes, no tweaks, was just innocently sitting at my computer when the [OAuth2-authenticated] emails started flowing again - and they seem to still be working. So presumably whatever MSFT had done to their servers / services has been reversed or otherwise addressed.

Thanks to all witnessed the unfolding saga, and particularly those who tried to help.
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