[GTALUG] Sane Email System?

[David Thornton]

Google tells me that getmail  and mutt can talk oauth2.

Have you tried that?

Looks a bit clunky.

David

On Thu., Mar. 3, 2022, 20:18 Peter King via talk, <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I've just been informed that "legacy authentication" is going to be
> disabled at the University of Toronto for my email account.  Well, I
> suspected something like this was in the works when they adopted MS Outlook
> 365+ as the mail server, but it still isn't welcome.
>
> Up to now, I've been able to use mutt and getmail for all my needs; I run a
> daemon that picks up (and then deletes) email from a variety of servers
> (University of Toronto, GMail, and so on) onto a single computer.  There
> I apply all the filters, spam protection, sorting into various inboxes,
> and so on.  To read email I just ssh in from any computer anywhere and run
> mutt.  All configurable with nice text-based scripts.  The email files are
> automatically backed up and sychronized to other computers, too.  When I'm
> out of town I have the mail be downloaded/deleteed manually, and I have
> full fallover capability, so if one machine is offline I can switch to
> another without any hiccups.
>
> But it looks like that is all going away, since Microsoft only supports
> what they call "modern" email clients, and on Linux only Thunderbird.
>
> I could switch.  But then rather than the fetch-and-store model, which has
> worked fine over the years, I would either have to change to a view-in-a-
> browser model (and so have to be running a GUI locally and store all my
> email somewhere else out of my control), or chuck my university email
> account and set up something else.
>
> At the moment I'm really inclined to do the latter.  I'll just set up some
> way of forwarding all my email to some text-based *NIX server somewhere
> that is happy to let me run scripts to deal with email.  But maybe I'm not
> being fair to the former alternative.  I have *no* experience with any of
> the "modern" email clients, and have been stubbornly clinging to the plain
> ASCII text as how email should work.  Maybe there are perfectly reasonable
> email clients these days with powers I know nothing of.
>
> (I am currently teaching a few courses at UCLA and was forced to use their
> webmail system, run by Google, and I have to say I despise it: graphical
> for no good reason, with limited search/sort capabilities, threading of old
> messages not clearly visible, and so on.)
>
> Any advice, suggestions, hints?  War stories?  Ways to thwart the powers
> that be?  Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> Peter King                              peter.king at utoronto.ca
> Department of Philosophy
> 170 St. George Street #521
> The University of Toronto                  (416)-946-3170 ofc
> Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
>        CANADA
>
> http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/
>
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