Esumsoft Forums

Anyone having intermittent trouble with Yahoo's OAuth? ("OAuthAccess empty")

I've been watching the behavior the last few days. I'm new to POP Peeper, so don't know yet if the cause is Yahoo or PP.

• After a fresh authorization it always works, at least once.
• One day it worked during a few hours. The next day it always failed. I re-authorized.
• Another day it didn't work for hours, then in the middle worked once (without any re-authorization).
• Manually triggering "check mail" to try again generally fails.
• Once or twice I could get it to succeed by restarting PP. It worked once after startup, then back to repeated failures.
• The Yahoo site still shows POP Peeper as authorized.

Unlike Yahoo, Gmail's OAuth works okay.

Is there a way to get a detailed log of the OAuth requests and replies?

Hello Reggorf and welcome to the Esumsoft Forums,

To better assist you, please post back with the complete text of the error message you are getting in POP Peeper by following the instructions in the Sticky topic below:

PP error messages: How to view them & copy/paste into your post

This gives us more detailed information needed to evaluate the problem.

Also, as you are our newest forum member, we ask that you please review the following Sticky:

Information for new users and forum members

The article provides important info which all new members should be aware of.

Other members of The Esumsoft Team may have additional feedback for you on the issue you are having as well.

Thank you & welcome aboard!

In general, I would say that Yahoo requires re-authentication more than Outlook or Gmail, but it's nowhere near the extent that you're describing; maybe a few times a year (but I'm probably not the best judge of that since I will often reset oauth just to test something). It's possible that something is triggering Yahoo to reset the permissions, so perhaps evaluate what you're doing and try to think if anything may be considered suspicious (e.g. logging into the same account from different locations simultaneously).

Otherwise, email me (support at esumsoft dot com) and we'll take a look at the logs.

Thanks spc3rd.

The error is only what I wrote in the first post. (Well, technically it's: "(OAuthAccess empty) -- OAuth2: You may need to re-allow POP Peeper access. Edit the account and press the 'OAuth2' button to re-authorize.")

Jeff,
No simultaneous multi-location accesses to Yahoo.
The thing is, sometimes a SINGLE check might succeed. Without any intervening action on my part, neither in PP or Yahoo.
So the core access token is still valid. I'm thinking, maybe something with the refresh tokens.

Could you tell me how to enable logging? I'd rather try to figure it out myself, as much I can anyway.

Press Ctrl+D on the main window to access the logger. I'd be interested in your log, too, which I'd prefer to discuss via email, as it's easier for me to keep track of the conversation.

Thanks!

Oh, I didn't realize you'd have specific interest in the logs.
But now it looks like it's just a firewall issue. Just need to figure out which rules are responsible for the intermittent behavior.

Ah, ok. This may be obvious, but in case it helps -- it will likely be an https connection as opposed to the standard imap port 143/993; specifically: https://api.login.yahoo.com/

Yep. I already suspected the refresh token requests, but seeing it plainly in the log made it more obvious (BTW, logging also IPs could be useful).

The firewall rules for port 993 were less restrictive, for port 443 more. Non-Yahoo didn't have issues, I thought maybe because of longer token expiry times, but they all seem to use 3600 seconds. Maybe they allow tokens to be used even past the official expiry time? But the main thing is, the non-Yahoo domains resolve to more consistent IP ranges, which were allowed through the firewall.

I'll keep an eye out to see if that solves it completely.

Just a follow-up...

Still good. It was indeed only port 443 being overly selective.

Glad to hear it