Subject: bug#41386: 28.0.50; Gnus nnimap OAuth 2.0 support

From: Thomas Fitzsimmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 10:05:48 -0400

Hi Richard,

Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > Some email services seem to be moving toward requiring MUAs to support
>   > OAuth 2.0, one reason being that they would like MUAs to do two factor
>   > authentication.  It would be nice to have this capability in Gnus's
>   > nnimap.
>
> This may raise some moral issues -- depending on what practical
> requirements there are.  Would you like to explain to me how the
> two-factor authentication works in practice, and what the user needs
> to have?

Thanks for having a look at this bug report.

I could explain in a general way how this might work for Gnus's nnimap
backend.  However, given what I've learned from Lars's and David's
responses, I would prefer to keep this bug report solely about OAuth 2.0
support, with a focus on Google's email services.

Two factor authentication can be implemented by a service without
requiring OAuth 2.0, and vice versa.  (Given what I've learned from Lars
and David I probably should not have even mentioned it in the initial
report.)  Therefore I think lumping the two concepts together in this
bug report will be too confusing.

We could open a new bug report, or open a discussion on emacs-devel,
about two factor authentication support in Emacs generally.  However, I
don't have a specific example to discuss or a bug to report about a
specific service, so I don't think the resulting discussion would be
focused enough to be productive.

Thomas