Re: gmail+imap+smtp (oauth2)

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> writes:

> On Mon 09 May 2022 at 10:01, Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> In case a school demands you have a Gmail account, it would be useful
>> [...]
>> There is no way any institution would support such a workflow. Apart
>> from the additional resource demands, it would raise lots of questions
>> regarding staff knowing student's email passwords. In many
>> schools/Universities, email is considered an official record and many
>> critical workflows are based around it (enrolling, unenrolling,
>> assignment submission, various approval processes etc). 
>
> When a school/university demands gmail account
> and google locks me out of my gmail account,
> what happens?

When a school/university makes a decision to use Google as their email
provider, it isn't 'normal' google - it is your school/university's
email, essentially hosted by google. As such, your institution controls
access, not google. Google just provides the service to your
school/university. Often, the setup involves integration with your
school/university IAM system i.e. your 'identity' (your username) is
managed by the school/university. This integration makes it easier for
existing school/university workflows to continue i.e. onboarding of new
students/staff, removal of accounts when students/staff leave etc. It
also makes integration with other services, such as on-line LMS (Moodle,
Blackboard etc) easier as there is just one 'meta directory' of all
accounts. This is where oauth2 shows its strengths. Your institituion
essentially becomes a identity provider which Google trusts. When you
request authorisation credentials, they are provided by your
institutions IAM system. Your client then submits those authorisation
credentials to get an access token from Google which you then submit to
the Google service you want to access (i.e. email). 

So, if your locked out, it is because your institution has decided to
lock you out, not google. 

Of course, the real solution here is that schools/universitites should
just get out of the business of providing email services to students.
Instead, they should update their workflows to allow a student to
specify what their email is and just leave it at that. Nearly every
student who goes to a University or school already has an email address.
Being forced to have a new one is not necessarily a 'benefit' (things
have progressed since the 80's where most people didn't have an email
account). 

For staff, slightly different situation. Email is considered official
records of the institution, so it is fair enough that the email account
you get as a staff member is actually part of your work relationship
with the institution and not your private email. Unfortunately, it isn't
that clean cut, especially for researchers etc who often associate their
email address with published articles/research. Things get messy when
the individual changes institutions. That is why there are a number of
initiatives for having institutional independent identifiers that can be
used. Unfortunately, there are more than one such scheme, so it will
likely take a few more years before everything becomes standardised and
consistent. (things get even more complex with respect to research data,
especially when that data is collected through complex funding from
private and public bodies - identifying who actually owns the data and
who is responsible for on-going costs associated with storing/hosting
valuable research data can be complex and difficult to manage).