Mozilla and Google Bidding for Turf?

[BobH]

Today, the Google screen that appears occasionally and can seemingly never be satisfied keeps popping up for me.

Screenshot 2025-03-23 133806.png

I've tried to follow its requests and allow all access but to no avail. At some point the screen changed to:

google.png

No amount of clicking the Allow button or anything else seems to work.

I've searched and found many complaints about it but no resolution.

I can't tell from the symptoms whether the problem stems from google or from Mozilla.

Has anyone experienced and resolved this? Can you tell me how to get it fixed?

It is blocking incoming email. I've tried to log in to my Ionos account which requires an email exchange. I can't receive the Ionos email.

I seem to have got past the first screen posted above and now have the second screen appearing at what appears to be random moments. After clicking on the Allow button, the screen goes away but when I try to get Thunderbird to check for and send downloads, T-bird makes no connection (there is no message at the bottom of the screen which is what indicates it has made the connection to the mail server). I've sent email messages among my accounts, some of which are gmail and some other domain mail servers. At one point, T-bird wouldn't send them, but I think I found that they were not syntactically correct email addresses. After fixing them, I sent the messages but never received them because T-Bird cannot seem to connect to mail servers.

Would you pursue this with Google or with Mozilla?

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

[BobH]

In case it might help someone else, I think this problem is resolved as evidenced by my downloading more than 80 emails after the fix.

I trying to resolve the problem, I contacted both Mozilla support and Google support. The google support was obviously AI and not at all helpful. At Mozilla, I got messages from what I think was a real person. Because my VPN was also accused in the process, I contacted Surfshark and received a "not us" response that was not helpful.

Mozilla suggested the problem was that the VPN was confusing Google about my location thus triggering Google's security response with the annoying popups. Google suggested that the problem was that Thunderbird had to have Accept Cookies enabled. Searching mentioned that gmail.com accounts have to have Oauth2 in the Authentication Method in for gmail.com accounts in Thunderbird.

I jumped through all those hoops some of them several times. I monitored what apps were running using Windows Task Manager shutting down any that I thought were contributing to the problem. I rebooted a couple of times.

As one last measure before tearing my hair out and lighting my other end on fire, I went through and checked all of the settings again for all my gmail.com accounts, checking that Accept Cookies was enabled, checking that Surfshark was not running then I rebooted yet again. When I restarted Thunderbird, I received a flood of emails going back 4 days. The annoying popup hasn't reappeared even when I click to download messages in Thunderbird.

I cannot explain what caused the issue or what action I took that resolved it. I can only report what I learned and what I did in hope that it might prove useful to someone else.