Since the late 1980s when I set up our department Research Computing Facility, my department has managed its own email servers. We now have extremely competent staff (not me!) who do great work dealing with spam, phishing, etc., and I get much less spam on my math department account than I do on, say, my account in the CS department, which uses a commercial spam blocking service. But recently the pressure from University IT to let them run all mail has increased to the point where we're basically being forced to shut down our own mail servers and use theirs, effective around the end of this month. I do need to continue to access my university email, both for reading and sending through the university's servers.
The university has decided not to allow any access to mail except through Outlook and GMail, where authentication goes through the campus 2FA process, etc. The university IT people would much prefer that all faculty and administrators use Outlook (they've generally tried to outsource as much to Microsoft as they can, especially things with any security implications--this gives you an idea where they're coming from), but there's an option for GMail which almost all of our faculty have chosen. But at least the GMail version requires support for OAUTH2. According to the university IT people, the only options for accessing our university mail on GMail without using Windows or Mac OSs will be the web interface and the Android and IOS GMail apps. They do admit that Thunderbird works, but they say it's "unsupported and may not continue to work". At present, I forward my university email to a department-supported machine in my office running Fedora, where I run dovecot. I access mail from various devices with IMAP, mostly using claws-mail on the Linux boxes (where I mostly run Fedora with KDE) and FairEmail on Android. It looks like they're going to make it harder (and probably officially forbidden) to forward mail routinely. I also use claws-mail to read my personal GMail account (which I don't use much, but need for some purposes), with an app password on some machines and OAUTH2 on my main desktop. But using OAUTH2 currently requires setting up claws-mail as a personal development project (in what Google calls the "testing" phase; the claws-mail code is not "approved" by Google for "production") and regenerating the authentication token once a week. I'd be happy to continue doing that and using claws-mail, but it seems that my university account is locked out of both app passwords and setting up a project. As far as I can tell, I won't be able to continue to use claws-mail for my university email, at least without forwarding it in explicit violation of policy. I have made sure that Thunderbird can connect to my university account, despite the dire warnings from the university IT people. (And FairEmail also seems to work fine for this on Android.) But the last time I tried Thunderbird, admittedly a fair while ago, I wasn't very happy with it--heavyweight, oriented toward HTML mail, opened too many links, etc. In the distant past, I mostly used email within Emacs (rmail and then vm) and I once looked at Evolution but again wasn't happy with how big it was and how much it seemed to pull in. I generally have been pretty unhappy with the web interfaces to email that I've tried, though I haven't spent much time in the latest incarnation of GMail on the web. So I'm looking for other suggestions about what might work, including more up-to-date views of Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. Thanks for any other ideas or comments. George -- George Avrunin, Professor Emeritus Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003-9305 413-545-4251 http://www.math.umass.edu/directory/faculty/george-avrunin
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