Sign in to gmail account fails (selenium automation)

Question

I have a Selenium service that has to login to my gmail account as the first step. This functionality was working couple of weeks ago, but suddenly the login starts to fails and i am seeing this Error in browser, tried both in Chrome and Firefox drivers in selenium -

This Error comes after the selenium service inserts the email,password and clicks on the sign in button. A similar error was also reported in Google support Forum here- https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/10916318?hl=en, They said that "Google seems to have introduced automation tools detection on their login flow!" but there is no solution in this thread.

Some Other Details which might be useful-

• I am not able to login manually to Google accounts in the browsers
  opened by Selenium.
• But I am able to login manually to these accounts in the Google Chrome application.

Let me know if you need to take a look at the code, i will post it here. Thanks in Advance!

Edit Adding Sample code to refer.

public void loginGoogleAccount(String emailId, String password) throws Exception {
    ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
    options.addArguments("--profile-directory=Default");
    options.addArguments("--whitelisted-ips");
    options.addArguments("--start-maximized");
    options.addArguments("--disable-extensions");
    options.addArguments("--disable-plugins-discovery");
    WebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver(options);
    webDriver.navigate().to("https://accounts.google.com");
    Thread.sleep(3000);
    try {
        WebElement email = webDriver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@type='email']"));
        email.sendKeys(emailId);
        Thread.sleep(1000);

        WebElement emailNext = webDriver.findElement(By.id("identifierNext"));
        emailNext.click();
        Thread.sleep(1000);

        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(webDriver, 60);
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("identifierNext")));

        Thread.sleep(3000);
        WebElement passwordElement = webDriver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@type='password']"));
        passwordElement.sendKeys(password);

        Thread.sleep(1000);
        WebElement passwordNext = webDriver.findElement(By.id("passwordNext"));
        passwordNext.click();

    } catch (Exception e) {
        LOGGER.info(String.format("No email/password field available or it is already logged in: [%s]: ",
                e.getMessage()));
    }
}

Answer 1

Toggle "Allow Less Secure App Access"
There is a setting on your account that you can toggle that may help with this. It is the "Allow Less Secure App Access". You should be able to visit the link below to toggle that setting if you are already logged into the gmail account you want to modify.

Link to change setting on google account: https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps

Further information(source): https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255

Answer 2

I just tried something out that worked for me after several hours of trial and error.

Adding args: ['--disable-web-security', '--user-data-dir', '--allow-running-insecure-content' ] to my config resolved the issue.

I realized later that this was not what helped me out as I tried with a different email and it didn't work. After some observations, I figured something else out and this has been tried and tested.

Using automation:

Go to https://stackoverflow.com/users/login Select Log in with Google Strategy Enter Google username and password Login to Stackoverflow Go to https://gmail.com (or whatever Google app you want to access)

After doing this consistently for like a whole day (about 24 hours), try automating your login directly to gmail (or whatever Google app you want to access) directly... I've had at least two other people do this with success. PS - You might want to continue with the stackoverflow login until you at least get a captcha request as we all went through that phase as well.

Answer 3

This issue was because of the selenium chrome profile. Create a new chrome profile and logged into it with the email id with which you were facing the issue. Then Turn on sync.

With this chrome profile in place I can skip the login steps and directly do the main process. Use: Chrome Options to add newly created chrome profile as an argument.

ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.setBinary("Binary path of the Chrome");

Hope this one helps you.

Answer 4

Check if your Chrome version is >= 79 and if so, downgrade to 78. Here's what I did (Windows):

I uninstalled "retail Chrome" which constantly kept upgrading itself to the latest version using sneaky tricks such as Google Chrome services that would check for updates in the background.

Even disabling those system services didn't help because retail Chrome also installs timer events that would re-enable said services in the middle of the night, so you'd wake up to a new version, and not even notice until things break.

I installed v78 from the "offline installer" found here, which doesn't seem to install any "helpful" auto upgrade features: https://www.neowin.net/news/google-chrome-780390470-offline-installer/

The above problem went away like magic. It appears that v79 has some anti-feature built in that calls home with information that allows Google to conclude that a bot is at work.

Hope this works for you... if not, you could invest a lot of time and create your own "Chrome simulator" by patching and compiling Chromium accordingly...

Answer 5

The only one solution which worked for me, just create fresh random google account, and that's it. Worked without any problems.

Answer 6

I fixed it by using selenium-stealth module and editing chromedriver.exe.

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium import webdriver 
import time
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
from selenium_stealth import stealth
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_experimental_option("useAutomationExtension", False)
chrome_options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches",["enable-automation"])
chrome_options.add_argument("--start-maximized")
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-logging')
chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled')
caps = DesiredCapabilities.CHROME
caps['goog:loggingPrefs'] = {'performance': 'ALL'}

# for editing chromedriver exe so that its not detected(run only once)
with open("chromedriver.exe","rb") as d:
    file_data=d.read()
file_data=file_data.replace(b"cdc_",b"tch_")
with open("chromedriver.exe","wb") as d:
    d.write(file_data)
driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver.exe',chrome_options=chrome_options,desired_capabilities=caps)

# for injecting js to that tab so that browser not detected
stealth(driver,languages=["en-US", "en"],vendor="Google Inc.",platform="Win32",webgl_vendor="Intel Inc.",renderer="Intel Iris OpenGL Engine",fix_hairline=True,)
driver.get("https://accounts.google.com")
time.sleep(3)
driver.switch_to.active_element.send_keys("myemail@gmail.com\n")
time.sleep(3)
driver.switch_to.active_element.send_keys("mypassword\n")