Successful Email transition to Yahoo: using Thunderbird on Windows

Hi DPS. I too went to Yahoo's security page and created an app password, but when I entered it in Thunderbird, I got the invalid password popup. So while that may have set the stage for me entering the Yahoo password that I had initially created, I rather doubt that it did anything useful. If anyone finds that using this "app password" was necessary,  I hope they will add a comment here to help other folks. And I wouldn't mind understanding it as well.

👍

Tried this- didn't work.  A useless window "inviting" me to establish a new account but I can no longer use Thunderbird.  There doesn't seem to be a way for me to access my accounts any way besides Yahoo's interface.

Getting Cox to Thunderbird was indeed the hardest part.  I had set up an App password but never had to use it..I changed SMTP aand IMAP settings in the TB  Server settings to the Yahoo ones I am sure you have but the authoriztion OAuth2 does not show up in the drop down until you restart TB a couple of times.  Yahoo is very slow so you have to let the servers have time to talk to one another.  I have 4 email accounts that after a total of like 12 hours finally have all in TB and working (except of the Unified folder deleting does not delete off inbox until you empty trash).

I hope maybe this helps but check out my other questions and you might stumble upon something that helps..  getting into iPhone was a piece of cake compared to this.

Okay... retrying.

The OAuth2 no-show was one thing that befuddled me.  What should I expect (errors) in the interim?  Had to reset my Cox account as it was (did so successfully) but am back at square one with the TB transfer.

Bear in mind, all my accounts have been activated on Yahoo.  The trick is to get TB and Yahoo to play nice.  Yahoo wants to pop a window every time I launch TB disabling checking for messages erases that annoyance.

Thank you for the response.

Edit: now launching TB in turn pops the Yahoo window seeking credentials for webmail without TB seeking a password.  Also- "authentication failure"  No place in TB to enter new password  The Yahoo popup when it attempts to "check for messages" is particularly goading.  Grrr....

Hi OldBob2. I had exactly the same thought as you and picked the address I was most able to live without if things went to the bad. Unfortunately, when you move one email address to Yahoo the rest will also automatically move. At that point the only access to your emails will be via the Yahoo webmail until you can get your email client, in this case Thunderbird, communicating with Yahoo. If you open TB right after setting up your Yahoo account, you will find that no emails exist there anymore. When you set up your account in Yahoo you will be required to use a password that is different from the Cox password.

Thx Waleee..I was afraid if you move ANY they all go..bummer.  So I guess as long as I enter a different password in Yahoo I should be OK..and change the in/out settings in TB with the new Yahoo password I hopefully should be ok..Last time I tried to use the Authentication method: OAuth2, Thunderbird did not like it for my IMAP but hopefully that has been resolved.  Hope I dont have to change too soon and many of these pitfalls will be worked out.

I think that would depend on how "strong" your original password is.  I tried the same password and Yahoo said it wasn't strong enough, so I had to come up with another.  Two special characters, numbers and capital letters and 16 characters total for Yahoo to decide if it was strong enough.

Hi Sadean. You bring up a good point about possibly loosing emails. From everything I've read on the internet, the settings for POP should be "pop.mail.yahoo.com" and port 995. Everything else stays the same as in my above post. I have not personally tried this, but as long as you enter it as POP and not IMAP you have nothing to lose by trying it. Please report back, it may help someone else.

Nosed around, and apparently I needed a one-time password at Yahoo to use when signing on to Thunderbird for the first time.  Here are the instructions for that.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/generate-third-party-passwords-sln15241.html

It worked for me :)

So I started on migrating to Yahoo using Thunderbird mail client. Two Cox users each with multiple Cox email accounts. Migrated a single account for each user yesterday. Attempting to migrate additional Cox email accounts for each user today.....able to send from one Cox email account for each user. Cannot send from second or third accounts for each user. Appears to me that failure is occurring when Yahoo special client password is not being recognized by the Yahoo smtp server. Have reached point of confusion overload. Any suggestions? By the way......I am using normal password setting.....why are you using OAuth2?

That happened to me too. What I did was, after changing the servers for incoming and outgoing I closed TB and reopened. When I went back to the settings OAuth2 was available.

nchw68  Thanks for the help.  I now have OAuth2.  I'm still not quite there yet.  I also am using TB version 115.10.0.  I went back and looked at your prior post where you said that you deleted the COX account and added it again.  I don't quite understand from where you deleted and added the COX account.  In that process did you lose any emails when you deleted the account?  My failure to understand may be due to age.  I'm well past the average age of male life expectancy here in the US.  So again, I greatly appreciate your help, 

I deleted it from within TB. I did not delete it from Yahoo. I had no emails saved so I had no emails to lose. Your emails should also be available on Yahoo mail online if you sign in with your COX email address.

BTW, it's no bother.

Thanks for your input. As a result, I logged in to the Yahoo webmail and also found that the spam folder contained unspam emails. I "turned off" the spam filter by using the approach given in the below link. I would much sooner have all emails come into Thunderbird and let me deal with spam locally.

https://clusterednetworks.com/blog/post/how-turn-spam-filtering-yahoo-email

Since I just did this, it's not yet a tested solution, but I don't see why it won't work.

I suspect this change by Cox collectively cost customers many thousands of hours, even just limited to dealing with the direct conversion...not including if they want to use a 3rd party email progam like the popular (26 languages) Thunderbird (over 20 million people per month (which doesn't include all the users behind corporate firewalls) per Thunderbird.

This is how I work this issue:

The Cox login remains the same as the one used to login to the Cox service, not necessarily the one that was used to login to your Cox webmail or other Cox email addresses, that doesn't change.

The Yahoo email address remains what it was with Cox (username@cox.net), with a new password. I had 4 emails that transferred over to Yahoo and my son had another (he is mad because you can't forward emails without paying $5/month for Yahoo premium, so anything that comes up that uses the Yahoo/Cox email he is updating the email service to another email and will soon be off the Yahoo/Cox service).

I use the POP3 and have all the emails stay on the server.  I did the Third Party app password from Yahoo once (not even sure it worked).  Since then all my email addresses under Thunderbird use just the one password for each account (4) and Thunderbird does all my junk mail filtering.

I have not logged into Yahoo web email in about a month and have not had to update any passwords or keep entering the passwords since I got everything transferred over.

I have found that the email is slow, numerous times with 2FA logins that send the code to email have timed out because the email hasn't arrived in time to use it (upwards of 5 minutes), in the process of moving those over to my phone, and will have to deal with the junk texts that come since they will have my phone number.

I hate to admit it, but since the initial PAIN of the transfer and the ongoing 2FA issues, it has been uneventful.

I still harbor animosity towards Cox with this whole transfer, because once you transferred your email their attitude was like, "HA! you're Yahoo's issue now!"  And Yahoo, either playing dumb as to get third party apps going (of course everything except their app is going to be less secure) was of no help, was probably hoping people would just give up and not use other apps.  Still, my thanks goes to Waleee (the originator of this thread) to get me operational.

Gidgey –

[Windows 11, T-bird V102, multiple Cox accounts] As I mentioned earlier, I experienced what I think is the same SMTP problem you are describing. I finally got past it, though I used POP, not IMAP, and the "Normal password" approach and not OAuth2. What I found is that when you set up the SMTP server, you immediately run into the "Default" designation. And when you enter an email account name into the "Default Server" box, the SMTP server now works only for that specific email account and no other. In earlier (Cox) days, you could point multiple email accounts at the same Default Server, and it would work. This seems no longer true.

To get past this, I closed T-bird, opened Yahoo email, logged into ONE of my email accounts, then went to Security>App Password, and generated an App Password (16 characters). That App Password is associated with the specific email account that I just logged into, so I wrote it down, along with the name of the account that generated it. Now I logged out of that email account, logged in to the next account, and did the same thing. Again, wrote down the App Password and the account name that generated it. Did this for each of my Cox email accounts – I had 6 of them. When I had done all of them, I logged out of Yahoo email entirely, and closed it.

Now open T-bird. Set up each of your accounts as you would expect to, EXCEPT that you may not point more than one account to the Default SMTP Server (and you are not required to use the Default Server for any of them). So do not hit EDIT SMTP Server. If you do, it will ask you to enter an account name., and it changes the default account from the previous one to the one you just entered. You need to set up a non-default SMTP server. Click Manage Identities. In the resulting box, you can ADD an SMTP server that is not a Default – do not click the "Make Default" button. And going forward, when T-bird asks you to enter a password for either POP or SMTP, enter the account's App Password from the list you made earlier, and click Save Password. Click DONE (or whatever), and then repeat this for each of your other accounts. This should get you up and running.

As a check, open T-bird, and find and click the Passwords>Show Passwords setting. You should see a POP Server line for each account, and an SMTP Server line for each account, and both of those lines should show the App Password for that account.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but it worked. I don't know how it would be different if you choose IMAP instead of POP, or choose not to use an App Password, or use OAuth2 instead of "Normal Password". If it doesn't get you where you need to be, come back to me and I will try to help.

jusdoit,

The instructions started with Waleee, we just added to them as we figured stuff out.

Don't know if each email is charged $5 to be "Ad Free", I would assume so since they are all treated as separate logins.

I have used  MS Outlook in the past for multiple email accounts and it worked fine.

/R

DPS