Re: oauth2 support for Emacs email clients

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

Hi Roland,

Roland Winkler <winkler@gnu.org> writes:

> On Tue, Aug 03 2021, Eric S Fraga wrote:
>> The easiest solution, in the end, for me was to install and run
>> davmail to get my emails from the institution.  I then use pop (could
>> have used imap but I prefer pop in any case) to get email from
>> "localhost" running davmail.  Davmail takes care of multi-factor
>> authentication for me.
>
> Thanks.  I tried this.  Indeed, this seems to work quite smoothly.

DavMail is a good fallback, but from a Free Software perspective it's
also helpful to use/test/mention the native IMAP/SMTP support in Emacs.
DavMail speaks a proprietary protocol to the email server.  IT
departments should configure the email server to also provide support
for IETF-standard email protocols.

IMAP and SMTP can use OAuth2 for authentication.  But to properly
support OAuth2 in Emacs, the FSF needs to talk to big email providers
like Microsoft and Google and get Emacs registered as an OAuth2
application (like Thunderbird has done), or advocate for some better
solution than embedding keys in the application binaries.  This was
discussed in bug 41386 [1]; I hope the FSF is working on it.

Thomas

1. https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=41386#104