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

From: Thomas Fitzsimmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 May 2020 10:35:40 -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. ]]]
>
>   > > Is it possible to log in on basic HTML view
>   > > passing via a proxy that will hide your actual location?
>
>   > Yes.  Here is the recipe I tested:
>
> That is a little less bad.
>
> Is there any positive indication that Google will let people continue
> using this basic HTML mode?

It seems like basic HTML view is the old mode that is still being
maintained.  Just after logging in, an HTML page mentions that "standard
view" requires JavaScript and that to use standard view one must enable
JavaScript.  But the same page then provides the option, "To use [...]
basic HTML view, which does not require JavaScript, click here.".  After
logging in, one can set basic HTML as the default view.  So it seems
like it is still fully supported.

(As an aside: basic HTML view uses old HTML-table-based, rather than new
CSS-based, layout, so it lays out nicely in EWW; in other words, it
provides a user interface that is friendly to simple browsers.  It's by
no means an efficient alternative to Emacs's native MUAs though.)

> I wonder -- is it possible for a program talking to that proxy to
> convert the messages in the Gmail server into a mailbox file which you
> could then pass to an MUA?

I don't see a way of downloading mailbox files via simple links.

It is technically possible to implement the conversion you're
describing, since one can click through several links for a given
message and eventually get the original text.  However, it would be an
awkward, fragile HTML-scraping-type implementation that I don't expect
would be viable in practice.

Thomas