Re: Making GNUS continue to work with Gmail

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 17/08/2020 09:23, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 02:00:41PM +0800, 范凯 wrote:
>> Is it possiable to just use the application specific password?
> 
> This is Gregory's option (2), right?
> 
No,  "app specific passwords" are a separate end-user facility google in 
particular currently offers (other providers certainly may not allow 
anything similar), where the end-user can generate secondary passwords 
distinct from their main one, for use with non-oauth2-supporting apps 
that use traditional username+password auth methods.

Using their "app specific passwords" facility requires enabling the "2 
step verification" facility with its own issues*, and then disables the 
ability to use the general "less secure apps" (google terminology) 
facility that allows traditional username/user-main-password auth.

App specific passwords are relatively complex and manual for the 
end-user to manage, and google may withdraw the facility one day too 
(well that surely applies to anything google does anyway).

Personally I have no idea from the various recent announcements around 
"less secure apps" how long they will continue to allow such "app 
specific passwords" in the sense of such username/app-specific-password 
plain auth (at the protocol level, not any out of band 2-step 
shenanigans) even after disallowing overall "less secure apps" (google 
terminology) in the sense of username/user-main-password plain auth.

I expect they would continue ...in the short term... to avoid completely 
locking out users of old mobile devices if nothing else.  Even so, once 
their usage stats drop below some level, they may move to phase them out 
- they're clearly annoying, error-prone and complex for users to manage 
compared to fully-implemented oauth2 flow (user-exposed complexity of 
manual token fetches and stuff is not normal even if emacs users are 
currently doing it)


(* perhaps not because it's bad in principle, simple password auth has 
its known issues, but because google initially requires and encourages a 
notoriously weak phone-sms method by default (subject to recent and 
high-profile attacks by "sim swap" social engineering and the like at 
other providers). Though you can configure e.g. totp instead afterward [1])


[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5185475?hl=en