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I have a home heating system that sends me emails to report system status.

I have a separate Gmail account for this purpose. The hardware just needs my Gmail address and password to do this, so I just set and forget.

A year or so ago this stopped working, and I discovered that the problem was that Gmail started requiring 2 factor authorization, and there was no way to set this up as the hardware is not using a browser. I solved this by setting Gmail to "low security" and everything was fine again. I don't think that security is important for this application, as the system can only send emails, not receive them.

Now Gmail is removing the low security option, so I'm stuck again. Is there a workaround for this?

The system does let me use SMTP, but I don't really know much about that. And I suspect that Gmail would still require some advanced authorization for this.

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If you have 2FA enabled on your account, you may be able to use app passwords:

An App Password is a 16-digit passcode that gives a less secure app or device permission to access your Google Account.

You should be able to use it in place of your regular password to sign in on your heating system.

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  • Thanks for the information. It looks like app passwords only apply to the device that you use to set them. However, your link informs me that I can get phone or chat support from google because I have a google one account. I didn’t know about that. I will explore it.
    – Barney
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 6:31
  • Thanks for the advice. I set up an app password and it seems to work fine. It would have been nice if the email from Google informing me about the problem had mentioned this as an alternative!
    – Barney
    Commented Apr 10, 2022 at 20:11

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