Creating an App-Password if you have 2-Step Authentication

Owned by Marc Miller
May 10, 2018
2 min read

In case you have set up your Connect Account to have 2-Step Verification, you may have noticed that you are unable to get your mail client to connect to your Connect Account.

To fix this, you will need to do the following:

First, log onto your Connect account by going to:

https://mail.google.com/a/ucsb.edu

Next, sign in with your Connect Account email address and password.

The system will ask you to verify that you are logging in if you haven’t connected to your Google Account on your browser, so be sure to verify you are connecting there.

Once you are logged in, go to the upper right hand corner, which should look similar to this:

We will want to click on the circle item in the upper right hand corner.  It will have a new menu, we want to click on the blue button that shows My Account.

When you do, it will pull up a new tab that should look similar to this:

We will want to click on the Sign-in& security portion of this page:

A new view will show, so we want to scroll down a little and find this section:

From here, click on the App passwords section.

Google will ask you to verify who you are once again with this window:

Just answer it again as you did before.  Once you do, you should see this:

This is where we will define an Application Password that you will use for applications like Thunderbird or other Mail/Calendar Applications that don’t use the Google 2-Step Verification method or the Google Sync Application.

Under Select app button, you will want to select Other and type out the name of the Application you will want it to connect to. We recommend you also specify the type of device/computer you are connecting to, for example:

We are describing this as connecting to Thunderbird on a Work PC.  You ideally want to keep each application separate, in case a computer gets stolen or compromised, you can revoke only that password without affecting other applications.

You will see a screen similar to the following when it generates the password:

This tells you don’t have to remember this password.

However, you will need to make sure to Save the password on your application.

You will not be able to refer back to the password once you hit Done on this screen.

Your only choice is to Revoke it and Generate a new App Password for the application.