Authentication tips

[Nick Bradbury]

FeedDemon switched to the "new" auth token authentication method last
month, and for the most part the change was a non-event: most
customers weren't aware of the switchover and experienced no
problems. I have had a few bug reports resulting from the change,
though, and I thought it might help if I shared them here.

The first problem is that the old SID authentication didn't require
the username to include a domain, whereas auth token authentication
does (at least, according to http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html#Request
). There have been a few FeedDemon customers who reported
authentication failures that went away after they appended
"@gmail.com" to their username. Because of this, I'm now
programmatically adding "@gmail.com" to the username if no domain is
specified.

And I have one customer who has been unable to use FeedDemon ever
since the authentication switchover - every request failed with HTTP
502. After quite a bit of back-and-forth with this customer, it
became clear that they were stuck using a corporate proxy server that
was mangling the request/response. There's nothing you can do in this
situation except cross your fingers that their IT department is
willing to fix the proxy (unlikely, in my experience!), but if you're
seeing customers reporting this problem, at least you know it's not
your fault :)

Nick

[Mariano Kamp]

Hey Nick.

Thanks for sharing. Very valuable and essential information. I got
reports of users entering the wrong password, but then it was probably
just this.

Adding @gmail.com probably doesn't work all the time, or would this
also work for the users that have accounts that end in googlemail.com?

Again, thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Mariano

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[Edwin Khodabakchian]

Thanks Nick. Very useful! -Edwin

On Mar 22, 11:51 am, Nick Bradbury <nick.bradb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> FeedDemon switched to the "new" auth token authentication method last
> month, and for the most part the change was a non-event: most
> customers weren't aware of the switchover and experienced no
> problems.  I have had a few bug reports resulting from the change,
> though, and I thought it might help if I shared them here.
>
> The first problem is that the old SID authentication didn't require
> the username to include a domain, whereas auth token authentication

> does (at least, according tohttp://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html#R...

[Nick Bradbury]

On Mar 22, 2:40 pm, Mariano Kamp wrote:
> Adding @gmail.com probably doesn't work all the time, or
> would this also work for the users that have accounts that
> end in googlemail.com?

This is just a guess, but my assumption is that since googlemail.com
redirects to mail.gmail.com, then this should still work.

Nick

[Jonas Kramer]

I just tried and all three variants seem to work, login without
domain, with @gmail.com and with @googlemail.com (I'm a
@googlemail.com user). I think that sometime in the past @gmail.com
didn't work for me though, but I might be wrong.

[Nick Bradbury]

Even though a couple FeedDemon customers had authentication problems
until they added @gmail.com to their usernames, my own account
authenticates just fine in FeedDemon without @gmail.com. However, I
downloaded the Byline update for my iPhone yesterday (which uses the
auth token method), and it failed to authenticate the same account
until I added @gmail.com to my username.

Can't explain it, just reporting it :)

Nick

[Nik Fletcher]

Hi Nick

Thanks for the reports and tips. Much appreciated!

Kind Regards,

-Nik