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

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 May 2020 00:38:46 -0400

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > > 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.

I don't see how "simple links" relates to what I had in mind, so I have
a feeling this is a misunderstanding.

  > 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.

That is what I had in mind.  Is it "fragile"?  If Google changes the
UI of the basic HTML mode, it would break.  Does Google change that
very often?

In any case, if Google breaks all advertized other ways of
transferring a Gmail account's incoming mail into a free MUA, scraping
would be MUCH better than no way at all.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)