Vper, I don't know why you're being so anxious over Gmail and The Bat. Gmail had announced that they would require OAUTH2 starting June 2022 and guess what.. they did!  I don't understand how that should cause you to think that Gmail is somehow suspicious of The Bat. Nothing that Gmail did had any relation to The Bat.

Anyway, Ritlabs made sure that The Bat would be able to deal with the new requirement, and they published their recommended settings for Gmail in the PSA that George shared above: Setting up Gmail in The Bat!  You are certainly free to contact Support, but do you genuinely believe that they would recommend these settings if they knew of a better way?

Logini on Gmail 16-07-2022 when the window in step 5 popped out:

Login failed
The browser or application may not be secure.
Please try a different browser. If you're already using a supported browser, try signing in again.

The Bat! suddenly stopped downloading mail via pop3, so I removed The Bat! from Gmail's authorized apps in hope to be able to re-authorize via The Bat!'s OAUTH window but I can't get it to open this window again, how do I force it?  

Issues with googlemail accounts (possibly related to using OAUTH)

About 3-4 day ago now, that would have been around September 3rd 2022 (possibly earlier and I just overlooked it), The Bat! 10.0.3 has been behaving strangely, i.e. I am seeing it crash to desktop after launching, or showing massive amounts of "Access Violation at address" windows when I try to do anything in the program. Yesterday I seem to have "lucked out" for a short while and The Bat! let me create a full account backup (just in case). I tried launching the app with and without /nologo... using /nologo seems to slightly improve the situation, but not much.
So, I manually downloaded and installed the latest 64bit version of The Bat! v10.1 and rebooted and ran that. Same problems. Today, the app directly just crashes to desktop, no "Access Violation at address" dialogues are shown.

I think I may have narrowed down the issue. I have set up my googlemail accounts (2 of them) and a third one that is on t-online.de, to automatically check for new emails and download them when I launch The Bat!. And the issues seem to happen when the app is trying to log in and download emails for my googlemail accounts, download of emails for the t-online.de account seems to work fine.
The app is showing the name of my GoogleMail account in to status bar of the app... and is performing "FETCH - Initiating TSL handshake"... this is with "/nologo" not set... and The Bat! then freezes. Using /nologo as a launch parameter, shows

"FETCH - Issuer: US, Google Trust Services LLC, GTS CA 1C3."

but then The Bat! crashes directly to the desktop. No warning or error.

I suspect that turning the googlemail accounts to OAUTH... something I posted about a few pages back in this thread (and that worked for me up to a few days now)... and The Bat! is not working any longer. Making The Bat! unstable. Possibly on the googlemail side of things.


I am guessing if I could get The Bat! to not crash on launch again, I could then turn off the auto-retrieve of emails for both my googlemail accounts and thus try to narrow down the issue some more.


Question: Does The Bat! have a "safe mode" that would just launch the app, but not download emails?


Maybe I should try and install the 32bit version of The Bat! and run that instead?

So, has anyone else with a googlemail account recently had issues like that?

Thanks.

Update: extra info

• - I am launching The Bat! v10.1 via the new executable called: C:\Program Files\The Bat!\TBLauncher64.exe
  
• - I just checked both my googlemail.com accounts via web-interface, there they did want me to "Allow smart features in Gmail, Chat and Meet to use your data" I did "continue" that, and then "Personalize other Google products with your Gmail, Chat, and Meet data"... I set that to "Use limited". The dialogue was blocking the web interface so you really seem to have to do something here. Did not help with The Bat! issues though.
  
• - I also went to the googlemail.com Security Checkup -> Sign-in & revovery -> Recovery email
  they wanted to me to verify an email. And I did. Just in case that was somehow causing issues. But The Bat! continues to have problems retrieving googlemail emails.
  
• - As a side info, apparently both my googlemail accounts do not have a single new email available, so The Bat! technically would not have to download any emails anyway.
  
• - Googlemail itself did not send me any warning / error / bug etc. emails either, i.e. about changing POP3 external access or the like.
  

I would start by rebooting Windows into Safe+Networking mode, and then try again. Maybe some 3d party software (anti-malware) is interfering with your connections to the mail server.

Thanks for that tip...


since disconnecting the internet, and all further tests from then on worked. I.e. my 2nd googlemail account continues to work just fine, it seems to be The Bat! & my primary account specific. And that even though until a few days ago everything worked just fine. And I do not recall messing around with anything in The Bat! (Well I did manually update from The Bat! 64bit v10.0.3 to v10.1 come to think of it, but the issues were there already before that update.)

You have pin-pointed wh ere the error occurs, but not what its cause is. By following up on my suggestion, you may still be able to figure out whether the error is external to The Bat (i.e. caused by 3d party software), or caused by The Bat or Windows itself.

Now that you have the precise access violation error details in TheBat_Exceptions.log, you can also submit your problem to Ritlabs' tech support (see Support menu on top of this page), who can see what their software was doing exactly when the violation occurred.  

However, the first thing that I would do at this stage is simply to compare the account settings for both Gmail accounts, to see if there's a difference that might explain why only one of them crashes.

Update: Under Options->Confirm immediate sending,  my 2nd account that works has that *not* set, the primary account had it  set. I changed that entry and relaunched The Bat!, hit F2 on the  primary account and The Bat! no longer crashes. Turned that option back on and still F2 does not crash the app. Keeping the setting off though.

• Now the primary account just does not download any emails from the server. The whole "authenticated" bit is not happening:
  

• Code
  (1) 2022-09-08, 10:31:17: FETCH - TLS handshake complete   2022-09-08, 10:31:17: FETCH - connected to POP3 server   2022-09-08, 10:31:17: FETCH - connection finished - 0 messages received

  
  
• as compared to the working secondary account's log:

  Code
  (2) 2022-09-07, 11:51:15: FETCH - TLS handshake complete 2022-09-07, 11:51:15: FETCH - connected to POP3 server 2022-09-07, 11:51:15: FETCH - authenticated (OAUTH2) 2022-09-07, 11:51:16: FETCH - 0 messages in the mailbox, 0 new 2022-09-07, 11:51:16: FETCH - connection finished - 0 messages received

  
  

So on my primary account I set the

• Account menu -> Properties -> Transport -> Receive mail -> Authentication to regular (from OAUTH)
  and then closed The Bat! and relaunched it. Then hit F2, and the log looked like above box (1), i.e. the authentication did not work and was skipped. That was to be expected.
  
• Turned Account menu -> Properties -> Transport -> Receive mail -> Authentication to OAUTH
  closed The Bat!, relaunched it. And then hit F2 on the account again... yields box (1)... the problems seems to be that The Bat! does no force you to get a new authentication code from googlemail, instead it reuses the one you set previously (accidentally tested this on the working 2nd googlemail account)
  

Apparently, the Authentication AOUTH code for my primary account is somehow broken and I need to get a new one.


So I think I need to use the web-interface and go into my primary account and delete the remote authentication OAUTH "code" set there, to let me get another new code via The Bat!? I seem to recall someone in this thread posting that he could not get The Bat! to ask for another authentication OAUTH code, i.e. the dialogue would not show up to ask for such a code. Any ideas?

I did some more testing:

- I created a new TheBat! account but to the same primary email address. And set things to automatic (while creating that new account). The Bat! automatically set that new account to IMAP...  The Bat! did ask for me to log into the googlemail account and get the OAUTH token. And I did get IMAP access to my account. But since I wanted POP3 access I deleted that The Bat! account again.

- Next I created another new email account in The Bat!, this time I did not use "auto" mode, I chose "IMAP or POP3" instead, and was able to set things up the way I wanted. Interestingly this automatically set up an OAUTH authentication setting under Account Properties. I copied all the settings from the primary account (gmaccount1) to this third googlemail account (gmaccount3). Relauchend The Bat!, just in case. And then hit F2 on gmaccount3. The Bat! opened up a window and let me connect to googlemail.com to get the OAUTH token (code), I copied it over to The Bat!, and then used F2 again to download the emails. And everything just works. I also sent out an email using gmaccount3 to gmaccount2, that also worked.

- I noted that you can sel ect several emails (messages) in e.g. gmaccount1 (the broken account) and copy them over to gmaccount3 (the new one) via Ctrl+V and that works just fine. I recreated most of the folders from gmaccount1 in gmaccount3... and will use this new account from now on.


Strange things I am still wondering about though:

1. Using the web-interface of googlemail account you can check on the status of external apps and security:

• - click on "Google Account" button (the coloured button in the top right)
  
• - click on "Manage your Google Account"
  
• - click on the "Security" vertical tab
  
• - scroll down to "Third-party apps with account access":    The Bat!    Has access to Gmail, Google Contacts
  
• -> click on Manage third-party access
  
• - On the  Apps with access to your account (page), under Third-party apps with account access
  
• -> click on The Bat!
  
• Here you can "remove access". I am guessing this will delete the OAUTH token.
  

Now in this interface you will also shown when The Bat!'s access was granted, for me that was sometime in May 2022 (i.e. when google was making OAUTH authentication mandatory)... the thing is, I called up that token 2 times today, once for the botched IMAP account (that I then deleted) and once for the present gmaccount3 account with POP3.

Since the date of the granted access for The Bat! was not updated to September 8 2022, it suggests that googlemail is sending out the very same token as long as the email account/pw and the app stay the same. (Alas I did not verify if the token was exactly the same). This would suggest that the broken gmaccount1 account and the current gmaccount3 account both still are using the same token from google.

If so, is the token for gmaccount1 just locally broken, and The Bat! does not / cannot ask for an update? Or is gmaccount1 broken in some other way?

Question: How does one force The Bat! to require the OAUTH token fr om googlemail again? (for gmaccount1)

2. I wonder what Support will come up with regarding the crashes (access violations)?

• A currupt local token might very well lead to crashes when The Bat! assumes it is working with a functional one.
  
• Another thing I felt was possibly suspecious is the use of filters. I use 15 or so on them on gmaccount1, whereas for gmaccount3 there are presently none. I looked through the filters for gmaccount1 and found one that was supposed to move an inbox message into a folder that no longer existed. I deleted that filter, but it did not help.
  
• And I still suspect something is up with the local files of the gmaccount1.
  

Anyway, thanks for reading, and at least for now I have a solution to the problem that lets me use my primary email account via The Bat! again.

I had a long discussion with support and finally I was able to get my primary googlemail account to work again. Then the secondary one briefly acted up, but it is presently also working. The main idea from support was that the MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN files of my primary account's Inbox folder may have been corrupted. Here the step by step, from Support, if this issue occurs for someone else:

• 1. Create a new folder in your 1st account
  
• 2. Copy all messages from the Inbox folder in the new folder (Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C)
  
• 3. Close The Bat!
  
• 4. Open your mail folder via "Start -> Run -> %email% -> OK"
  
• 5. Access the folder of your 1st account
  
• 6. Open the Inbox folder
  
• 7. Delete MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN files
  
• 8. Launch The Bat! - your Inbox folder will be empty now. Try to receive new mail now.
  

Ironically,  as it turns out, I use a relatively complex set of sub-folders (even sub-sub-folders, 30+ of them) inside of the \Inbox... this may not be ideal. Using Ctrl+Shift+Cursor-keys I selected these folders one-by-one and moved them into a newly created top level folder called \Archive. I did not "Delete MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN files" at this point, but did a F2 (Get New Mails) and everything worked again. It seems that moving about the folder structure in The Bat! (to neaten up things), can/may have side effects. In this case fixing my issue. I later did delete the two files as mentioned in point 7. and everything continued to work. I.e. no more crashes and the download/sending of emails worked again on the primary googlemail account.

Tangent: Now here I want to mention some strange things that in the end actually helped me recover messages/emails that I thought I had lost in May 2022 (using The Bat! v9 back then, presently using v10.1). Apparently there are mechanisms in The Bat! to hide folders and to show them again. Well in May 2022 I used the Ctrl+Shift+Cursor-keys to move around quite a few folders from my primary account. And at some point, i.e. after relaunching The Bat! these were sudden gone. When clicking on folders/an account you can right-click and Find Lost Folders... that should have found my "lost" folders, but as I tested this yesterday, it did not. Now by moving everything out of the primary account's \Inbox there should no longer be any local files there (except for MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN). Turns out, when you check your local files (on the HDD) via %email% path for the primary account, that the \Inbox folder actually contained several folders, and was not empty at all. Inspecting these turned out to be The Bat! folders that I had lost due to a "glitch". Luckily, The Bat! lets you use

• Tools menu -> Import Messages -> From The Bat! message base v2 (.TBB)
  

to import the MESSAGES.TBB file that every one of those lost folders contains manually. Thus all this huha let me find and re-import my lost messages/emails. And I am really thankful for that. I am still not clear what was going on here, but I suspect the very powerful ability to move around The Bat! folders in the accounts via Ctrl+Shift+Cursor-keys, can lead to unexpected side effects. Well, in my case at least, that happened twice now (once losing folders, once fixing the Inbox getting message crashes).

Tangent 2: Now after all that, I wanted to send an email from the secondary gmaccount2, to the primary one gmaccount1 (as a test), but suddenly the gmaccount2 is asking me to fill in a password, even though it is running via OAUTH authentication for email receive *and* send. Now, just a few hours ago I updated the properties for that account

• gmaccount2 -> Properties -> Options -> Check mailbox at start-up
  

from on to off. I re-launched The Bat! but issue is still there. Turned gmaccount2 receive authentication to "regular", as a test, this let me re-enter the account's gm server password under properties. Tested again, failed. Switched receive authentication back to OAUTH, re-launched The Bat! and still it did not work. Apparently, after another re-launch of The Bat!, when I wanted to write up a bug report to support, and me testing sending of emails on gmaccount2, suddenly everything worked again. No asking for passwords. Email send and receive work.
Now I suspect that The Bat! (even v10.1 I am using) glitches out sometimes when you change the properties of an googlemail account. And only after some "fiddling" and re-launches The Bat! fixes itself again.


Context:
Please note, I have been using The Bat! for more than 20 years, and some of the accounts on there are from over 20 years ago. The two googlemail accounts are 14+ and 13 years old. So in all that time backupping the account, then reimporting them into a new PC build (twice) over all these years is bound to lead to issues... but up until the beginning of September 2022, I never had such problems. So is this also my fault for using The Bat! for such a long time continuously? In part probably yes.


Summary:
1. I would recommend you do not archive/sort *all* your emails/messages into \Inbox, as I did. Instead create new top level folders in your account and move the incoming messages from the Inbox into these new folders if you want to archive them.

2. When moving around account folders (i.e. changing the order folders are shown on-screen) in The Bat! using the Ctrl+Shift+Cursor-keys, be very careful, or avoid doing that to begin with.

3. Finally, keep an eye on changing the properties of email accounts in The Bat!, don't needlessly change settings. Or it may lead to glitches.


Conclusion:
I think that my primary googlemail account's Inbox, i.e. its local files MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN, had some issue (as Support suggested), and all the fiddling about at some point fixed them and thus fixed the download of emails, i.e. no longer crashing The Bat!. Should you ever need to delete those two files, copy all the messages in the Inbox to another folder first though (again as Support suggested).


Hope all this will help someone else, one day. Thanks for to the folks here and Support for reading and the suggestions.