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

[Adriaan de Groot]

Hi Uwe,

On Monday, 10 August 2020 18:02:34 CEST Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> On Montag, 10. August 2020 09:12:12 CEST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > Uwe Brauer - 10.08.20, 09:02:15 CEST:
> > > 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.
> 
> 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.

There's an intransparent and arbitrary vetting process in place, where Google 
approves an application's access to Google services. 

I blogged about the issue, on behalf of Dan Vratil who was doing the actual 
work of dealing with Google, 

https://euroquis.nl/kde/2020/05/12/google.html
https://euroquis.nl/kde/2020/01/13/google.html

I'm sure Dan could describe the process in more detail, but it (slightly 
cynically) comes down to this:

- you will need a Google account *for the application developer*,
- this application needs some API keys,
- this application needs a privacy policy,
- the application + policy must be submitted to the arbitrary process,
- wait anywhere from 3 days to 6 months,
- possibly the application will be allowed to connect to Google services.

There is code in KDE-PIM somewhere that does the actual API-key-wrangling, 
that's not really the issue.

[ade]
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