As part of this year’s technical housekeeping, I decided that I would use just one email client for all my email accounts, the top two of which are vincent.isles@vislesco.com for my law practice and islesv@gmail.com for most of my activities unrelated to legal practice. I had wanted to do this thing last year, but July 2022 came and go without me finishing the task, so I moved it to this July 2023. (July is an inventory month for the court and we usually have lighter tasks because of less hearings around this time.)
I had been using Microsoft Outlook 2016 for vincent.isles@vislesco.com, and so the next logical step would be to add islesv@gmail.com to the same Microsoft Outlook 2016.
My first impulse was of course to just to create a new account in Outlook and input my Gmail credentials. That failed. So I had to get my notebook where I enclosed a printout of my overly complicated password for my islesv@gmail.com just to make sure that I was typing the correct characters. I was.
Next thing I did was to disable temporarily the two-factor authentication, maybe that was the problem. It was not, so I turned it on again.
I was thinking perhaps I missed some key setting, so I switched to manual setup, and followed pop2imap.com‘s guide. Still no luck. I always receive the message asking me to check https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833 (unfortunately, I did not bother taking a screenshot of the message, as I was not thinking of producing this article).
Finally, fed up, I downloaded Mozilla’s Thunderbird program. While I like Outlook 2016, I don’t hate Thunderbird; it’s just that I am used to using Outlook. But if Outlook just would not log in islesv@gmail.com plus some other @gmail.com accounts that I have, I can ditch it. (Probably Outlook 365 will work, but I think I have to upgrade to the 365 versions the other members of the Microsoft Office suite as well, so nah.)
Voila, Thunderbird just worked right away. I was prompted with the screen where it is confirmed that I understand that the application will have so and so privileges on my account – a screen which would not pop up in Outlook 2016. (Again, I did not take screenshots because I did not think I would write this article.) I think this pop up screen should also have been seen in Outlook 2016, but for one reason or another, it would not pop up, thus my log in process fails.
In any case, I might as well use Thunderbird now. I am just writing this note that as of July 2023, Outlook 2016 is now incompatible with @gmail.com addresses. It appears that it had been incompatible since after May 30, 2022, but I did not notice that last year because I was not able to tick off my list of tasks that of consolidating access to all my email addresses in just one email client.