> On Tue 07 Jun 2022 at 06:35, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > He said "private": > I can now again access my private gmail account, > In civilised world, employers do not dictate brands for private stuff. > One has a choice. Ok before this discussion is going to escalate, some clarifications 1. Since some 10 years or so, my university uses gmail. That is a fact. Now I did not really care, because we had plenty of disk space out of a sudden and I used free software to access my account (either gnus or thunderbird/seamonkey). However, Tim Cross pointed out, this is not "really" a gmail account, more a service google provides for academic institutions. Now the university requires me to send official email, using the official "from" as provided my the university. There might be tricks to use other SMTP servers but as other, I think Tim Cross being one of them pointed out, users pointed out, this approach run into problems concerning SPAM filters. The information policy of my university concerning technical details about the email accounts is murky at best. However they told us, that we need to switch to 2 Factor identification and *maybe* cannot access anymore imap and smtp the «usual» way. Till now this did not happen, but it might in any moment. Fortunately as Tim and other pointed out, I can use, what google calls a app password that I have to generate. I find this a bizarre design/security decision since this password is considerably shorter than my original imaps/smtps password. Be it as it may that seems to be a working alternative and allows me to continue to use gnus. 2. I do indeed also posses a private gmail account (actually 2, one of them is very old, the other I used just for the notify extension of mercurial to send notifications to my collaborates when pushing to public repository). Again I did not really care about the things RMS mentions correctly on this web page, because they don't apply to me, I still access my email using free software and I encrypt my private mails so that google cannot scan them. Now, since 1 of June indeed one cannot access anymore the private accounts (at least I cannot) via imaps/smtps and this is why I was worried and wrote my email. The app password approach however works. Now, if google decides to discontinue its app password approach and oauth2 is not going to work, in that case I have to switch to any other provider, because I need to access my email with free software. I hope to have clarified any misunderstandings Regards Uwe Brauer