Re: Making your own application credentials as a user

[Tim Cross]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>
>   >   Because of this each user has to create their own 
>   > application credentials,
>
> Has anyone here actually done this?
> If so, could you please post a practical description of what you had to do?
> How long did it take you to do that?
>
> Did it impose any additional onerous conditions (beyond the conditions for
> using Gmail, since by assumption you've accepted those).

Yes, I did this a while back. It is a pain, but not terribly onerous.
Basically, you have to register as a developer and agree to Google's
T&C. However, in my case, as I have no plans to actually develop any
application to be released and am only registering to get the developer
ID in order to use it as part of my personal workflow to get the
necessary oauth2 tokens to allow access to IMAP and SMTP, those T&C are
largely irrelevant. I'm not using it now - mainly because when I did it,
there were other issues - main one being I use mbsync to access the IMAP
server and I had problems getting that working correctly. So for now,
I'm still using the old application password facility. 

I think the key point here is that requiring all users who want to
access  an oauth based email provider to register as a developer in
order to use Emacs to access the mail service is too much of a barrier,
especially for less technical users. People are more likely to change
their email client rather than jump through those hoops.

It should be noted that users do jump through very similar hoops for
other oauth based Emacs packages. For example the spotify, slack,
stakcOverflow, forge and paradox packages all require the user visit a
web site to create a token or get an application ID. In some of those cases, 
you also have to
register as a developer (spotify and possibly slack - I can't remember).

Of course we also need to note that if Emacs was able to get registered
as an approved app with Google, then uses would not need to register as
a developer. However, this only addresses one mail provider. It does
nothing to improve the workflow for other oauth based service providers.
How far is Emacs prepared to bend over in order to enable users to use
Gmail?