Kmail: Gmail (less secure apps) advice for GNU emacs developers.

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Montag, 10. August 2020 18:20:07 CEST Uwe Brauer wrote:
> >>> "ASJ" == Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde at carewolf.com> writes:
> > On Montag, 10. August 2020 09:12:12 CEST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> >> Dear Uwe.
> >> 
> >> Uwe Brauer - 10.08.20, 09:02:15 CEST:
> >> > Hello
> >> > 
> >> > I am writing on behalf of the GNU emacs developers, Richard Stallman
> >> > in particular, asking for advice.
> >> > 
> >> > The issue concerns an announcement by the gmail developers to drop the
> >> > option to connect to their IMAP service via name and password, known
> >> > as less-secure-apps. The main email reader of GNU Emacs, called gnus
> >> > relies on this method. Someone on the GNU emacs developer list
> >> > suggested that kmail solved the problem and is able to connect to the
> >> > GMAIL imap server using their OAuth2 method.
> >> > 
> >> > So the question is addressed to the kmail developers, but I could not
> >> > find an active mailing list just for kmail, so if this list is not the
> >> > right place to ask the question, I would appreciate a link to the
> >> > relevant one.
> > 
> > I would recommend  anyone concerned with privacy rights to not use Gmail.
> > OAuth2 is just a way for Google to force people to use Google Chrome for
> > logging into google services. Google currently block all privacy secured
> > forks of Chromium from using their login services (supposedly because
> > some spammers used CEF to log onto GMail). You can make it work at the
> > moment by pretending to be Firefox (or by using Firefox), but I am
> > guessing it is just a matter of time before Google also block Firefox for
> > "security" reasons.
> 
> Ah, well, in a perfect world fine, but for example, my university
> switched to Gmail some years ago and will stay.
> 
> Since I don't want to use any other email reader than gnus, and a lot of
> people feel this way, any advice on a _technical solution_ is very much
> appreciated.
> 
Sure. Only mentioned it because you brought up RMS, I know he is pretty 
passionate about stuff like that.

Btw, you can see an overview in https://developers.google.com/identity/
protocols/oauth2 which also links bindings for a number of programing 
languages (though not for EMACS LISP). As far as I know KMail uses the 
libkgapi library, which is a KDE implementation of the whole google client 
api.  I don't think you don't need that much to just do the authentication 
though, but I am a browser guy, don't know how things looks from the app side.

'Allan