recommendations, pros/cons for Fedora mail clients supporting OAUTH2 with GMail? - users - Fedora Mailing-Lists

Monday, 20 June 2022

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".

At present, I forward my university email to a department-supported machine
in my office running Fedora, where I run dovecot. I access mail from
various devices with IMAP, mostly using claws-mail on the Linux boxes
(where I mostly run Fedora with KDE) and FairEmail on Android. It looks
like they're going to make it harder (and probably officially forbidden) to
forward mail routinely. I also use claws-mail to read my personal GMail
account (which I don't use much, but need for some purposes), with an app
password on some machines and OAUTH2 on my main desktop.  But using OAUTH2
currently requires setting up claws-mail as a personal development project
(in what Google calls the "testing" phase; the claws-mail code is not
"approved" by Google for "production") and regenerating the
authentication
token once a week. I'd be happy to continue doing that and using
claws-mail, but it seems that my university account is locked out of both
app passwords and setting up a project.  As far as I can tell, I won't be
able to continue to use claws-mail for my university email, at least
without forwarding it in explicit violation of policy.

I have made sure that Thunderbird can connect to my university account,
despite the dire warnings from the university IT people.  (And FairEmail
also seems to work fine for this on Android.)  But the last time I tried
Thunderbird, admittedly a fair while ago, I wasn't very happy with
it--heavyweight, oriented toward HTML mail, opened too many links, etc. In
the distant past, I mostly used email within Emacs (rmail and then vm) and
I once looked at Evolution but again wasn't happy with how big it was and
how much it seemed to pull in. I generally have been pretty unhappy with
the web interfaces to email that I've tried, though I haven't spent much
time in the latest incarnation of GMail on the web. 

So I'm looking for other suggestions about what might work, including more
up-to-date views of Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. Thanks for any other ideas
or comments.

  George

-- 
George Avrunin, Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics and Statistics 
University of Massachusetts    
Amherst, MA  01003-9305      
413-545-4251
http://www.math.umass.edu/directory/faculty/george-avrunin