Awhile back Google threatened to make 3rd party applications unable to login to Google Voice over XMPP.  I don’t rely heavily on the service, however I do have a few desk phones for convenience sake that rely on these connections, one in particular for my wife’s grandma who happens to live with us and is definitely beyond hope for using an iPhone. I don’t care to have a dialtone run to my home because of both the cost and the simple humility of thinking about such a barbaric technology invading my home.

I recently added another Google Voice “trunk” to my FreePBX box to add some additional simplicity to life, but found that it wasn’t working well I thought maybe my newly created account was subject to the threats formerly made. I read a lot about how the problems can be worked around by recompiling Asterisk and using oAuth (don’t sign up for an acct at PBXIAF, just read on) – all of which sounded way more complicated that I was prepared to go through and maintain for this particular nearly unused application.

A bit of additional digging, Googling and investigation based upon some of the E-mails I was getting reading :

led me to find that this can be easily remedied. Google has created a page https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps to allow you to let your Asterisk based PBX to login using the code as shipped, 1 simple radio button and life is back to normal.

Incidentally the reason that my other account hadn’t broken is because I’ve implemented 2 factor in which case you just use an app specific password.

Thanks again Google!