News: 1588596311

"Far be it from us to suggest that this might be a fitting reminder that it is time to consider a move to something a little more modern rather than trying to access Google email from a third party client."

Are you suggesting we should be more up to date by having different apps for different mail providers? How very modern!

No, of course you can let that single provider access all of your mail accounts and put its long pointy nose into them too....

I got rid of third party email server even for my personal use years ago.

still using this? How quaint. Well... if you want all your emails scanned by Google then carry on.

It's impossible for e-mail to work without the receiving server reading the e-mail. The only way this wouldn't be the case if the body of the e-mail was encrypted and therefore could only be rendered by the recipient. Then the receiving server would be reading the encrypted body.

It's what the receiving server/person/company does with the data they collect or could collect that may be an issue.

if the body of the e-mail was encrypted and therefore could only be rendered by the recipient...

... the security of the sign-on would be largely immaterial too.

There's an awful lot to be said for encrypted e-mail. It's almost inconceivable that e-mail if invented today would not be encrypted and yet somehow we're still still in the shadow of UUCP.

I use gmail to communicate with friends and other humans. I use secure mail services for anything that needs to be secure.

I'm honestly at a loss here trying to understand what's so bad about - for example - using the Outlook desktop client to handle email from an Exchange account, and both my Fastmail account and a Clook account via IMAP.

Or is the problem just that I'm not down with the cool kids?

Probably that. But neither am I, you know. I use Gmail for my professional mail only. For the rest, I have a French national mail account (with La Poste, the French mail service), and then I have my personal mail server for everything strictly private, between friends and a special spam account for when I have to sign up to some site that doesn't deserve it.

I access my Gmail with a Chrome, obviously (work, remember ?), but I forward everything I get to one of my personal accounts which I access with Lotus Notes via POP.

For all the rest of my email accounts, I use Thunderbird, which is configured to not leave mail on the server. And I purge my Gmail account as soon as a thread is no longer relevant.

In other words, my mail is local, I don't leave it on someone else's server. Not even mine.

"The problem appears to be related to POP3 and IMAP access; if you're connecting to Google's servers using those services, then sending and receiving email could be a challenge."

Especially sending email would be a challenge that way, as neither POP 3 nor IMAP is for sending email. That would be SMTP.

Google's SMTP was also down this morning, but is up again now (at least for me).

OAuth2 is a fucking bind to implement on third-party email clients because you've got to crowbar a full browser into the IMAP/POP authentication stage and there are no real standards for authentication, each provider does it is own way and email client developers have to reverse engineer it.

This is what happens when you let huge corporations take control of open standards.

But one piece of software/app per provider protected by its OAuth2 wall is more modern (the author knows what he's doing when he drops that word into the article).

I'd suggest that what's required is something a few decades LESS "modern" - how about ditching cancerous authoritarian providers like GMail and Outlook.com and going back to completely standards compliant email services that don't bind you to provider lock-in or intrude into your entire online life?

I can never understand why people read email in a browser, rather than 'modern' it seems totally antiquated to me. Outlook started demanding my gmail password this morning - ironically it is only my backup for if my main email goes down.

Took me ages to get Outlook working with GMAIL again - found the answer by accident. I'd been looking at the security area, but under the gmail settings POP3/IMAP tab I found that while it showed POP3 had been enabled for a long time there was no option selected. I selected Allow POP3 and all worked again.

Thought it was just me as I could find no news at the time (around midday UK time) but looks like maybe Google took a simple annoying route to try and stop people using third party clients.

Hmmm, not sure who "us" is here, but one of the uses of email received as an email rather than a monitored stream of html is the ability to parse it for one's own purposes.

Spam filters work in this way, and therefore it would appear that what is being advocated as "best practice" is that Google knows what's best as regards what is and isn't spam.

That's one purpose. With browser-email we're going back to the days of independent silos of information, needing to be transcribed and entered into a different silo. I write email parsers for customers that need the ability to automatically process orders and such-like, in order to revolutionise their productivity. If orders have to be copied and pasted from a browser-based interface there is a reliance on the operator doing it correctly, and who's to say that the provider might intersperse the message with formatting that breaks copy/paste.

Had a report of this this morning.

Had a look at the settings on the machine in question.

The only thing needing tdoing was switching the "Security and Authentication >> Authentication method" to "OAuth2".

After that, everything went back to "normal" Monday-mode.