On 6/20/22 13:50, George Avrunin wrote:
Since the late 1980s when I set up our department Research Computing Facility, my department has managed its own email servers. We now have extremely competent staff (not me!) who do great work dealing with spam, phishing, etc., and I get much less spam on my math department account than I do on, say, my account in the CS department, which uses a commercial spam blocking service. But recently the pressure from University IT to let them run all mail has increased to the point where we're basically being forced to shut down our own mail servers and use theirs, effective around the end of this month. I do need to continue to access my university email, both for reading and sending through the university's servers.
The university has decided not to allow any access to mail except through Outlook and GMail, where authentication goes through the campus 2FA process, etc. The university IT people would much prefer that all faculty and administrators use Outlook (they've generally tried to outsource as much to Microsoft as they can, especially things with any security implications--this gives you an idea where they're coming from), but there's an option for GMail which almost all of our faculty have chosen. But at least the GMail version requires support for OAUTH2. According to the university IT people, the only options for accessing our university mail on GMail without using Windows or Mac OSs will be the web interface and the Android and IOS GMail apps. They do admit that Thunderbird works, but they say it's "unsupported and may not continue to work".
In june gmail turn off the legacy password access via pop3 in my account,
but I found turning on 2-step verification in the security section of my gmail account, enabled the app password option, a 16 character password to use instead of the legacy password in my getmail's pop3 download
thunderbird seems to know how to setup it oauth2 to sending mails via gmail
regards,
Gabriel