See Automatic Conversion of Google mail accounts to OAuth 2.0 Authentication

I can't find any "OAuth 2.0" in my unusable thunderbird account.

My "Account Settings" list is completely blank.

Hello jwill1000000

as you were saying in your first post that you were prompted for a password, something that can hardly happen if you have no account setup, it seems that your reinstallation wiped out your existing account(s) - something that definitely should not happen. Or possibly it created a new profile.

To see if it's the case, try to use Help / More troubleshooting, then locale the 'about:profiles' part and click it. It should display a window listing the existing profiles, if you have more than 2, it may be possible to switch back to the previous profile. On the other hand, if you did not have much interesting data previously in Thunderbird, you could just as well recreate the account.

I have no idea how to find "Help/More". I can not use anything in thunderbird without a password. How can I have Google just completely delete my password, or allow me to set a new one without need for a login?

I have no idea how to find "Help/More".

When people (volunteers, unpaid) try to help you, thanks for taking this in account and don't complain to the world on how it is not fair, we can't fix the world and in particular not Google, maybe helping you to fix your Thunderbird if we are lucky.

So please reply to questions, one at a time.

Does your Thunderbird display a menu (a thing at the top of the Thunderbird screen) where are displayed things like File, Edit, View... ? If yes, do you see an entry Help to the right of the menu? If yes, do you see under the Help menu, an entry called 'More troubleshooting' ? If yes, can you follow the procedure I outlined in my previous message and say what is the result ?

John M. Williams < [edited] @gmail.com>

Dec 16, 2022, 11:51 PM (9 minutes ago)

to no-reply > Does your Thunderbird display a menu (a thing at the top of the Thunderbird screen) where are displayed things like File, Edit, View... ?  jmw: NO All that's displayed is three fields to fill out in vertical order: "Your full name", "Email address", and "Password". I can fill in the first two, but no "Password" is accepted. Below these fields is a choice of "Cancel" or "Continue"; "Continue" is disabled.

> If yes, do you see an entry Help to the right of the menu? If yes, do you see under the Help menu, an entry called 'More troubleshooting' ? > If yes, can you follow the procedure I outlined in my previous message and say what is the result ?

All right, your profile has been wiped out. When you reinstalled Thunderbird, did you reinstall the version that was already installed or did you download a new version from the Thunderbid site ? That could explain the profile disappearance if you used a very old version before and the new version is not compatible and as such creates a new profile. Not sure about that, but I can't think of another reason your previous profile has vanished.

Err, actually there could be another reason, did you delete files or directories with the File Explorer after uninstalling Thunderbird ?

All that's displayed is three fields to fill out in vertical order: "Your full name", "Email address", and "Password". I can fill in the first two, but no "Password" is accepted. Below these fields is a choice of "Cancel" or "Continue"; "Continue" is disabled.

That is the Account Setup screen. You don't have to provide a password for your Gmail acount at this point just yet. Simply fill in your Full name and email address. The Continue button will become active as soon as you type in your email address. Leave the password field blank and click Continue. If the Continue button remains inactive no matter what, that profile is corrupt and you will have to start afresh.

I tried following your advice, but when the "Setup" screen quits, I get a goodle login prompt which reads my email and then demands my password. And, none of the alternatives, such as "send text message" do anything!

Also, I missed one of your questions above: I reinstalled with the same (latest) version of thunderbird.

@jwill1000000

I think that in your post at 5:37 you replied to Stans, while in your post at 5:40 you replied to me. It's confusing because Stans and me are not coordinating at all (we don't even know each other), so to make things clearer, I am following the line of trying to restore your previous working profile, while Stans is trying to make you create a new working profile. If you are using Imap Stans is mostly right, it could get you up and running faster, while if you are using Pop3 you may have to recover your old mails (since with Pop3 your mails are not stored on Google's servers).

So in the first case, as asked by Stans, when you get a Google prompt asking for login/password, this is normal: this is how Google's authentication works. It's called OAuth2. So you should provide them and it 'should' work (I say 'should' because we are dealing with computers here). It's possible you lost access this way initially, since this mode is new and was changed in a new Google rule last October.

In my approach, trying to get at your old profile, we have not progressed. Uninstalling and reinstalling the current latest (is it 102.6 ? latest depends on the system) should not wipe your profile and settings. I am doing itwithout problem. So while we don't know what is your system, I will do a wild guess and assume it's Windows. So can you do a screenshot of

C:\Users\(your user name)\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles

and post it here ? replace (your user name) by your user name under Windows.

Let's see the screenshot gp asked for.

Note: If you uninstalled Thunderbird the normal way via the Control Panel or Settings app, then your profile should have remained intact and Thunderbird should have launched with that profile after reinstallation. If you, however, used a third-party uninstaller that also wipes out residual files/folders and registry entries, it's possible it may have also deleted your Thunderbird profile!

Having looked at your other thread here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1399321, to which you never replied after sfhowes responded, you seem to not know what your Google (Gmail) password is. Recover your Google account first, by visiting https://google.com/recovery via a browser and regain access to your account. Don't expect Thunderbird to connect to your account if you yourself can't get in via a browser. Then, and only then, can you sign in to Google via Thunderbird.

My system is not Windows. It is Ubuntu (latest update of Ubuntu OS).

I can't seem to receive the message for 2-step verification, either, although I used to receive it: My phone number is ([removed phone# from public forum] and has not changed in a year.

In that case, refer to Profiles - Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data

Don't post your phone number (or email address) here. This is a public forum, anyone, including bots and scammers can see and abuse it. Also, we can't help you with your Google account. Use the link in my previous reply.

OK. How can I remove my phone number?

Click the 3 vertical dots that are on the top-right side of that reply and choose Edit this post.

My system is not Windows. It is Ubuntu (latest update of Ubuntu OS).

in this case your profile should be under ~/.thunderbird. cat ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini should show you what is the subdirectory containing your profile. Should be something like ???????.default-release (where ?????? is replaced by random characters)