Re: oauth2 support for Emacs email clients

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > What I consider to be more important is that the Thunderbird developers
  > kindly ask to not copy their client ID/secret for other applications,
  > and we should respect that.

We were talking about using Thunderbird to convince a server to
authenticate you, then using the authenticated connection with
movemail to read the mail in Emacs.  I think you've changed to a
different question about a different scenario.

  > > How would it even notice that he's using Emacs rather than Thunderbird?

  > By looking over his shoulder, through a security audit of his laptop, or
  > he might simply tell...

That might perhaps happen.  Just as an employer might perhaps tolerate
use of Thunderbird but not Emacs.  This is not impossible.

But is that situation likely enough that we need to worry about it?
We could say, "Unfortunately, we don't know a way to cope with that
situation.  We hope you find a less rigid employer."

If an employer objects to installing Emacs on the company's
laptop, I think the Emacs-using employee will face bigger problems
in using Emacs than how to read mail with it.

My message ended with this:

  Emacs can be thought of as a modified version of Thunderbird, right?

That's a serious point.  Emacs and Thunderbird can, in principle, be
merged in many different proportions.  There is no clear, correct
boundary in that almost-continuum with "Emacs" on one side and
"Thunderbird" on the other.  You could modify Thunderbird step by step
and eventually get Emacs.

I wonder, is it possible to take a part of Thunderbird and modify it
into a mail-fetcher program that produces an inbox file, for use in
place of GNU movemail?

Does Thunderbird as released have that capability?  Maybe people could
simply run Thunderbird to fetch the mail using oauth2.

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