Re: oauth2 support for Emacs email clients

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:

>>> As I've written: Public client applications are only allowed to access
>>> web APIs, so no IMAP/SMTP.
>>
>> OK; I wasn't sure if by "web APIs" you meant only "OAuth-related web
>> APIs".  Thanks for confirming.
>>
>> I wonder why Microsoft does not allow public client applications to use
>> IMAP/SMTP.
>
> Actually, after I've looked a bit into this, I think I'm mistaken and it
> is possible to register a public client with IMAP access.

OK, thanks for checking.  That's encouraging.

>> Maybe the FSF could request that Emacs be registered as a public client
>> application and also be allowed to use IMAP/SMTP.  That would solve the
>> "embedding a secret in Free Software" part of the OAuth registration
>> issue, at least for Microsoft servers.
>
> In a company setting based on Microsoft services, the problem is not
> really so much to get your client registered, but to get your IT
> department to enable IMAP and to explicitly allow your application
> access to your mailboxes.

It depends on the organization, I guess.  My organization has IMAP
enabled.  To use Thunderbird, I attempted to authenticate IMAP using
OAuth.  The administrator received a request for access from
"Thunderbird" (identified by Thunderbird's Microsoft-assigned globally
unique identifier (GUID)), which they granted, after which I could use
Thunderbird with IMAP.

I haven't tried yet, but I suspect using Emacs in my organization would
be harder because, what GUID would I use?

I think it's worth the FSF getting such a globally unique identifier
assigned for GNU Emacs, so that the permission-granting workflow would
be as easy for Emacs as it is for Thunderbird.

Thomas