[Clarification] (was: [SOLVED (magic?)])

[Uwe Brauer]

> On Tue 07 Jun 2022 at 06:35, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

> He said "private":

>     I can now again access my private gmail account,

> In civilised world, employers do not dictate brands for private stuff.
> One has a choice.

Ok before this discussion is going to escalate, some clarifications

    1. Since some 10 years or so, my university uses gmail. That is a
       fact. Now I did not really care, because we had plenty of disk
       space out of a sudden and I used free software to access my
       account (either gnus or thunderbird/seamonkey). However, Tim
       Cross pointed out, this is not "really" a gmail account, more a
       service google provides for academic institutions. Now the
       university requires me to send official email, using the official
       "from" as provided my the university. There might be tricks to
       use other SMTP servers but as other, I think Tim Cross being one
       of them pointed out, users pointed out, this approach run into
       problems concerning SPAM filters.

       The information policy of my university concerning technical
       details about the email accounts is murky at best. However they
       told us, that we need to switch to 2 Factor identification and
       *maybe* cannot access anymore imap and smtp the «usual» way. Till
       now this did not happen, but it might in any moment. Fortunately
       as Tim and other pointed out, I can use, what google calls a app
       password that I have to generate. I find this a bizarre
       design/security decision since this password is considerably
       shorter than my original imaps/smtps password. Be it as it may
       that seems to be a working  alternative and allows me to continue
       to use gnus.

    2. I do indeed also posses a private gmail account (actually 2, one
       of them is very old, the other I used just for the notify
       extension of mercurial to send notifications to my collaborates
       when pushing to public repository). Again I did not really care
       about the things RMS mentions correctly on this web page, because
       they don't apply to me, I still access my email using free
       software and I encrypt my private mails so that google cannot
       scan them. Now, since 1 of June indeed one cannot access anymore
       the private accounts (at least I cannot) via imaps/smtps and this
       is why I was worried and wrote my email. The app password
       approach however works. Now, if google decides to discontinue its
       app password approach and oauth2 is not going to work, in that
       case I have to switch to any other provider, because I need to
       access my email with free software.

I hope to have clarified any misunderstandings

Regards

Uwe Brauer

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