Securing Google and Restoring GTalk
Yesterday, I lost access to my GMail and GTalk accounts on my laptop - and it was saying that the password was bad. The first was covered in this post, and this morning I attacked the second. Overnight, I was just hoping that it was a transient thing, and that Google would restore whatever it decided to turn off, but that was not to be.
Given that Adium is now limited to just GTalk and ICQ, there really wasn't a lot of reason for me to keep it running, if I couldn't fix this authentication issue. So... knowing that Google wanted me to secure my account - but doing that would kill the old scheme for Adium, I decided to go ahead with it, and if it didn't work, then I'd just shut down Adium, and have to live with the loss of communication to my friends.
Securing Google
So the first thing I needed to do was to turn off the Insecure Access in Google. This is just saying the old, plaintext, username and password being passed to Google. This was the only way the old Adium worked, and so I had to leave it like this. But that's all changing.
Once that was turned off, I knew I wanted to use Authy for the Authentication App for Google because I didn't like the SMS codes, and Authy is just a nice tool for exactly this purpose without worrying if your SIM card has been cloned. So I turned that on, and typed in the first code, and we're good to go.
Finally, I needed to generate a single Application Password for Adium, and that was all done from the Security tab in the Google Account Settings. Not bad at all, they generate a 16-character code, and you then use it for that app. You only get to see it once, so make sure you type it in correctly, but you can always make another.
Testing Adium
Once I had the 16-character application password for Adium, I pulled it up, typed it in, and BAM! it worked. I could almost not believe it! This was exactly like the POP3 issue - I'm guessing Google just got tired of the less-secure methods, and just shut them off. Period. Now with the 2FA on my account, the Application Password is as secure as Google wants to make it. 16 characters is gonna be really hard to guess.
And as I was testing Adium... still a little giddy that this all worked, and I had also locked down my account, I got a notice from Mail.app that I needed to enter my password.
Ah... IMAP was not using the 2FA, and I needed to pull up the accounts in Mail.app, and go through that login once to get the login using 2FA, and to to trust this device. When that was done, email was back online, and GTalk was too.
What a heck of a morning! Very good news!