Re: oauth2 support for Emacs email clients

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> but isn't this the issue - a 'registered' application is just one which
> has a registered application id key, but the T&C for the major mail
> providers does not allow that registered ID token to be public, which
> means it cannot be put into Emacs source code.

Only the FSF, as the copyright holder of Emacs, and with its legal
expertise, is in a position to try to research and solve these issues
and do what may be necessary (e.g., advocating for changes to terms and
conditions that in practice prevent the use of Free Software email
clients for these services, publishing safe usage guidelines if such
advocacy fails, etc.).

Thomas