Thunderbird& Gmail – Configuration could not be verified

I have literally become a KDE junkie from the time Kyle introduced me to it, however, I recently decided to migrate from Kcontact [1] to Thunderbird [2]. Yes, moving is hard, but I just had to. Hooking up my work email addresses was pretty much straight forward, however, configuring Gmail’s IMAP settings was not a walk in the park. I spent the greater part of yesterday searching for possible solutions online –turns out, the problem was simple after all.

Addition of a Gmail Account kept resulting into the error below; even explicitly copying and pasting credentials that worked via the Web browser didn’t help.

Configuration could not be verified --is the username or password wrong?

IMAP and SMTP settings where automatically detected and so that was clearly not the problem –I did try fiddling with the addresses though. No luck there either.

IMAP: imap.googlemail.com
SMTP: smtp.googlemail.com

It turns out though, “application specific” passwords need to be seperately generated for applications like Thuderbird. This can only be done after the two-step verification process [3]. If problem persists, try to Uncaptcha [4].

Bibiliography

[1] http://userbase.kde.org/Kontact
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
[3] http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=1056283&page=guide.cs&answer=185833&rd=3
[4] http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=1056283&answer=185834&rd=3#ASPerror
[5] http://www.techlifeweb.com/2007/10/27/gmail-imap-and-thunderbird/