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

From: Thomas Fitzsimmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 May 2020 10:30:55 -0400

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. ]]]
>
>   > Two factor authentication can be implemented by a service without
>   > requiring OAuth 2.0, and vice versa.
>
> Ok.  But my concern is not about OAuth in particular.  The crucial
> question is, will Gmail in the future permit access from the Free World
> in any manner whatsoever?
>
> In other words, if we look at all the ways of logging in that Gmail
> permits in the future, will _any_ of them be usable in the Free World?
>
> Can you help me find the answer?  If it is no, we had better put all our
> strength into changing that answer.

OK, I'll try to help, but I don't know what Google or Gmail will do in
the future, in general, obviously.  I wanted this bug report to be
specifically about Gnus, IMAP and OAuth 2.0 (which the responding
experts correctly inferred was more precisely about Gnus, IMAP and
Gmail's proposed OAuth 2.0 policy change).

Your question reminded me that Gmail provides "basic HTML view" which
does not require any Javascript whatsoever for sign-in or for the main
interface, and thus is fully useable with Emacs Web Wowser (eww).  For
me that isn't a viable alternative to Gnus, so it's tangential to this
bug report, but that access method is feasible using entirely Free
Software.  Hopefully that answers your question.

Will "basic HTML view" still be available after Gmail starts mandating
OAuth 2.0 for IMAP access (assuming they do, sometime in the future)?  I
suspect it will, but I don't know.

Thomas