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Ask HN: Any Dumb Email Client for iOS and Android?

1 points by WayneBro ↗ HN
Hello, I am searching for a dumb email client: one that simply connects to my IMAP and SMTP servers (even if they're Google's servers). The ones I've tried so far (Outlook, Spark, etc.) seem to all want OAUTH access to my Google account. I don't want their servers accessing my mail, I just want a dumb email client. Any suggestions?

What's really annoying to me is that Outlook and Spark on iOS both let me setup IMAP for Fastmail, but as soon I enter `imap.gmail.com` they prompt me for OAUTH access.

4 comments

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detaro
They want OAuth because as far as I know, gmail (at least as a default) only allows IMAP access with an OAuth token. And just because it uses OAuth it doesn't go over any servers, Google added an OAuth extension to IMAP so that apps can get tokens and use those to authenticate.
WayneBro
Thank you for that bit of info. I will search around for some documentation on that.
detaro
Here is Google's technical description: https://developers.google.com/gmail/oauth_overview

I couldn't find an actual announcement of the switch to only allowing this method, but plenty of complaints about it: seems to have happened in 2014.

niftich
See this earlier post of mine [3], reproduced here for clarity:

This changed sometime in 2014. You used to be able to use IMAP authtype 'simple', but in April 2014, Google released a rather vague blog post [1] about how they're going to deprecate something; please move to OAuth 2.0.

The Thunderbird team's bug tracker has some context [2] where they had to move quickly to add functionality to Thunderbird to support the SASL XOAUTH2 for IMAP so that Thunderbird would keep working with Gmail.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/04/new-security-measure....

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1059100

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12395631