Re: mbsync with XOAUTH2 SASL mechanism

[Timo Wilken <guix@twilken.net>]

Hi Peter, hi Giovanni,

I had the same problem with having to register an "app" to access my
emails (but with neomutt, not Emacs).

Instead, I ended up "borrowing" Thunderbird's client key and secret,
which has worked fine so far.

Maybe I'm being a bit paranoid, but I don't want to post the literal
key here. You can copy it from mailnews/base/src/OAuth2Providers.jsm
in Thunderbird's source tree (look for "login.microsoftonline.com" in
the kIssuers variable near line 140). Send me an email privately if
you can't find it.

I hope that helps,
Timo

On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 07:41:51AM -0500, Peter Polidoro wrote:
> 
> Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu> writes:
> 
> > have you solved your problem?
> 
> No, I hate to admit that I have given up in frustration.
> 
> My work email unfortunately uses office365. I work for a large nonprofit
> science foundation. I wish they only used free software, but some of the
> enterprise software is proprietary. I used to be able to read and write my
> work email with Emacs, but after Microsoft changed their policies, that no
> longer works.
> 
> I found several sets of instructions online for getting outlook365 OAuth2
> working with Emacs, such as this one:
> 
> https://sites.uw.edu/bxf4/2022/09/01/getting-uw-outlook-365-oauth2-to-work-with-emacs-mu4e-mbsync-and-msmtp/
> 
> I submitted a cyrus-sasl-xoauth2 guix package, but the guix side is not the
> frustrating part.
> 
> The frustrating part is that all of the instructions online say you need to
> create an "Azure Active Directory App". I created one and it seemed to work
> fine, but after a couple of weeks it expired and then I kept getting emails
> from Microsoft saying I needed to pay them money to keep the Azure app
> running. I really do not want to subscribe to anything Microsoft related,
> even if my work pays for it. That link references another authentication app
> from Thunderbird, perhaps there is a way to get something like that working
> with Emacs, but I could not find any detailed instructions to do so.
> 
> Right now I am able to read and write personal emails in Emacs, but for all
> of my work emails I am forced to use Outlook in a web browser.
> 
> > Last but not least, please consider that if you can (and if your company
> > server/postmaster allows it) it's much better to use an "app password"
> > method instead of Oauth2
> > https://pypi.org/project/getmail/#oauth2-privacy-policy
> 
> I wish. That is the problem. App passwords used to be allowed by office365,
> but they changed that policy.
>