I have a very serious and obtuse problem with Bitwarden access
I am a paying customer!
It started with my trying to setup an new device – an android phone.
After I entered the information it said “sent verification email” and opened new window to enter the verification code. Email never arrived at registered account inbox – so I click resend.
It errored “cant send email” with Error retfrofit2- -xxxxx 401
I reinstalled app, reset cachce – nothing made a difference.
I went to my computer and tried to send a mail to bitwarden support.
I hit submit and I got back that it sent email for my inbox to confirm (why! I was already logged into my account bitwarden site).
That email never arrived!
Then I tried to register to this forum with the same email address and that account couldn’t be activated because that email never came either, I hit resend 3 times – and gave up.
So I registered to this forum with a different email address and was able to post this.
My questions is
#1 – Can I fix it? I don’t have 2FA or any other method to login and verify my access
#2 - How can I reach bitwarden if I can’t send them email (because they don’t accept it unless I confirm that I sent this email!)
Check your spam folder to see if the emails ended up there.
Try to see if other services can send to your email. For example, try registering your email with HaveIBeenPwned (to get notifications on account breaches).
If you can get an email from HaveIBeenPwned, Bitwarden services are likely having problems sending you the email. Only customer service can help you. I would contact them using the email you use for this forum and explain to them that your Bitwarden account email is another working email that is having problems receiving emails from Bitwarden. See if they can find out if the email address is on some kind of filter list that would prevent sending emails to it.
Once you have the problem with emails figured out, you should consider enabling 2FA using an authenticator or a security key to avoid such similar problems in the future.
ps: I changed the thread’s title and the tags to reflect what your wrote.
That part actually sounds like a bug (and should probably be reported on GitHub).
Just an additional explanation: When you don’t have set up 2FA for your Bitwarden account/vault, then you are subjected to the New Device Login Protection. That’s where this “verification email thing” (on an to Bitwarden unknown device) comes from now… But as @Neuron5569 implied, Bitwarden support can disable that temporarily, so that you can login.
This issue is more obtuse and probably has a lot probelms — -
I spent 2 hours last night and went to bed frustrated – Remember I couldn’t register the forum account in my email address that I use with the bitwarden account.
So I used a different email address to enter this forum!
Here is the kicker – This morning something new happend.
On the same TCP phone I attached the stacktrace above, I tried again — it did the same thing again .. Failed again.
So I closed Bitwarden app and ran it again .. The behavior was strange .
It popped the “enter verification number” screen and then closed it and logged me
NO VERIFICATION NUMBER FOR BITWARDEN – I didn’t have an email on my account and I didn’t enter the verification number on the screen.
What this means is that thte verification process is badly broken along with whatever this bug was that cause emails to not get sent.
This makes me nervous about the security of the authtentication process
This is alsmost 2FA .. but it seems to be compromised.
I tried logging into my account on webpage – enterd my credentials -and it said, it doesn’t recognize this device and is sending a verification email – That email NEVER came
I hit resend and the web app does nothing – No Emails are being sent out.
Last night I had logged in on my home computer and sent a message to support – but that message probably never made it either.
#1 it’s not my not receiving .. it’s Bitwarden not sending (send it failing authentication .. ) and that problem is on Bitwarden servers, it’s treating most of my machines as new machines also (it seems)
#2 There are much bigger issues with the authentication .. – Please see my detailed message to Micah below .. seems like that Email Verification is bogus underneath!
I am tempted to enter the bug on Github – but I noticed that link is for android – and though my first problem occured on an android phone, I have seen that I can’t send emails from web app on my computers either!
2FA seems to be broken also .. pls see my reply to Micah
Problem is all path lead to the email – if you email is not working – I can’t make any change to the account!
I can’t setup 2FA because the verification mail is required – I think this is a single point failure of the whole edifice – one thing goes down .. nothing to recover from
As written above, you can contact Bitwarden support (also via this form), and shortly describe that you can’t login to the web vault due to not receiving verification emails and that they please temporarily disable the New Device Login Protection (I think, it’s for 24 hours).
(Just for clarity: The New Device Login Protection can be disabled by support – all 2FA options can’t.)
I started this thread last night – about an hour ago I received about 20 emails from Bitwarden - it seems they had received my emails but the system was not able to reply to them – so all my verification codes came cascading in – and the account I had tried to create on this forum got activated also.
My Android phone got accepted because someone turned off the verification this AM – that’s the only explanation I can think of — other possibilities are probably remote.
It also means that someone cleared something on the Bitwarden servers to start sending me emails – so that’s squared and it’s up to Bitwarden to address what it was.
I am writing to you to tell you that you have a rather restrictive policy of 5 or so postings an hour? or for a newbie - i was trying to responsive and tried to provide as much information to anyone who had responded to my post – but the Forum Bot stopped me from posting for 23 hours ( at around 11AM EST)
I think it’s an overly restrictive policy, I can understand if someone is being disruptive, but if some one is just asking for help, a little more indulgence will be nice; but hey, I never needed to use this forum and I have been a user for ~10 years now – -I guess you won’t see me for another 10
Hi there and thanks for the feedback! There is a limit on new users to protect against ongoing spam/phishing attacks, that puts a limit on how much you can reply in a row before someone else replies to you.
Email does that sometimes. Now that you are back in business, I do recommend (as @Nail1684earlier said) setting up TOTP or Yubikey so that you do not have a dependency on email. And if you have not already done so, please set up an emergency sheet so that you can recover from future authentication problems.
If one highlights some text in the community, there is a “copy quote” option. One can use this to respond to multiple people in a single reply (as I am doing here). This helps avoid being impacted by this limitation and it also helps prevent the conversation from bifurcating.
TCL T779W 
12@31 
prod
commit: bitwarden/android/release/2025.8-rc33@b497156302a73fd2b14de16106dc218c30ec1702
build source: bitwarden/android/actions/runs/17277676605/attempts/1