email-oauth2-proxy VS Mailspring

I built a proxy a while ago to make this easier - it lets you stick with IMAP/POP/SMTP as-is. No need for your client to even know that OAuth exists. See here: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

What makes you say the protocol is different for each provider?

I maintain a proxy that transparently adds support for OAuth 2.0 support to IMAP/POP/SMTP clients (https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy), and for normal use it doesn’t need to know anything about which service it is connecting to. Apart from advanced features such as CCG or ROPCG which are mostly O365 only, what is different?

When it became clear many major email providers were going to require OAuth for IMAP/POP/SMTP access, I was pretty frustrated that I’d have to stop using clients/scripts that didn’t support this method.

Rather than spending lots of effort on migration, or switching clients entirely, I made a local proxy so that any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy. No need for your client to know about OAuth at all.

If you are not familiar with Email OAuth 2.0 Proxy by Simonrob, I would recommend you check it out. Star the repo or whatever you normally do. I wanted to acknowledge his repository because my work is built directly off what he maintains and creates.

https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

"Just works" I run it with mbsync at the command line.

You do need a client id and some interaction with your O365 admin.

One potential solution I found is a proxy. Are you able to utilize an app password for this task?

You do still need details for an authorised client, but it’s possible to use those of one that’s already approved. See the readme section that explains this aspect: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy#oauth-20-clie...

If you use this proxy of mine then any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

I fully agree, moreover this:

> Rolling release distributions like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed follow upstream much more closely while still maintaining stability through thorough automated testing

Shows the author hasn't used Tumbleweed for any reasonable amount of time himself[0][1][2]. I daily drove it for a short while before moving to Fedora.

0: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/533

1: https://forums.opensuse.org/t/tumbleweed-breaks-after-update...

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/v09hnc/tumbleweed...

/u/protonmail is the a reason why there's been no effort on this front? It appears that it comes down to some sort of handshake issue but I can't imagine this is that hard to fix.

I was hopeful that https://www.nylas.com/ would be the de-facto "adapter" placing a common API surface on top of the major providers and dragging them into a modern-API world. They even had an email client of their own as a proof of concept (forked by one of the original authors as https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring - and its reusable core https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring-Sync may be interesting to many here). But they've pivoted towards making their API only available behind B2B contracts and opaque pricing, and primarily used for corporate email monitoring and CRM use cases - perhaps because security and privacy considerations are nontrivial. I'm still rooting for them but it's a shadow of what it could have been.

Mailspring

Mailspring- A great email client for windows (Opensource + Freemium)

I love Mailspring, it's modern and open source: https://getmailspring.com/

The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.

The only app I’m aware of which translates emails is this; https://getmailspring.com

Mailspring is quite nice. It also has a paid version and is actively updated so I think it's likely to stick around for awhile.

Mailspring, which is open source, is currently my recommendation for a desktop email client.