Re: Alternative mail providers

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

On 2019-02-20  9:21 PM, Van L wrote:

[...]

> ProtonMail may prove too hard to
> make work inside of Emacs.  If
> anyone knows how I'd like to know.
>

Yes, in that case I’d recommend against ProtonMail.  I haven’t used it
personally (only briefly tried it when it first came out) but it appears
that they don’t support IMAP and SMTP out of the box.  They do seem to
have a “bridge” that you’d install on your system that provides a local
IMAP/SMTP interface for use with your email clients and then sends your
emails to the server.  Two major downsides of it are that firstly it’s
proprietary, and secondly you need a paid account to use the bridge.

There does seem to be a free software implementation called hydroxide[1]
which was presumably created by reverse engineering the ProtonMail web
app and APIs; might be worth a shot.  Otherwise, I’d recommend Disroot
or one of the other community-based alternatives I mentioned before.

[1]: https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide

>
>   https://gandi.net
>
> I found gandi.net when I looked up
> who Debian registered their name
> with, a long time ago.
>
> For $10 per year (thereabouts) you
> can buy a vanity domain with 5
> mailboxes. Then it is possible to
> make that work inside Gnus.
>

Gandi is a nice domain registrar, but I haven’t tried their mail
offerings.  But I do know at least on one other list on lists.gnu.org
folks were having trouble with bounces etc due to one person’s use of
Gandi mail.  IIRC they raised the issue with Gandi but I can’t remember
if it were fixed or not.

>
> Has anyone had success in using a
> .authinfo.gpg for Gnus?
>

I didn’t have any trouble setting it up to use with the nnimap backend.
Does a line like this not work in your ~/.authinfo.gpg?

machine accnamehere login email@here password passwordhere

Though there does seem to be a bug such that long username+password
combinations cause the password to be truncated when calling the IMAP
server.  I reported it a few days ago[2] but didn’t get any replies yet,
and I haven’t had time to look into it myself.

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-gnu-emacs/2019-02/msg00424.html