Posts from gmane no longer allowed?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-09-26, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not sure what the significance of the "application" is - Google has
> different services for where you're using it with your own domain, but
> that shouldn't be relevant. If you want to use Gmail with mutt, you
> should be able to do that, regardless. (Or you can just use some other
> email address to post from, that would also work.)

I have other addresses from which I could post, but I don't want them
visible on the list.

There are three ways to use mutt (or any other IMAP/SMTP) client with
GMail.

 1. Plain old username/password authentication: This requires you to
    enable the "less secure apps" option on your Gmail account. I used
    to use that, and it worked. But, it's frowned upon, and I wouldn't
    be surprised if it went away soon. It requires you to either put
    your password in a plaintext config file or enter it every time
    your connect to Gmail.

 2. Application-specific password: Creates a unique 16-digit
    application password that allows access to selected
    capabilities. This requires that you have two-factor
    authentication enabled on your Google account. I probably should
    do that, but I haven't figured out a convenient way to do so.

 3. OAUTH2: This requires that you "register an application" with
    Google. That application is then issued revokable credentials. The
    application uses those credentials to send an access request to
    Google. The account's owner then goes to a specified URL to
    autorize that access. The application is then issued revokable
    access and refresh tokens. The access token allows access to
    specific APIs for a short period of time (maybe an hour). After
    the access token expires, the refresh token can be used to obtain
    a new access token.

The "register an application" step is where I got stuck. Other mutt
users seem to have been able to go to their GMail account's cloud
services page, create a project, create/register an application, and
then download OAUTH2 credentials which they then use (via an external
utility) with programs like mutt and msmtp.

When I tried to "register an application" it demanded support and
privacy policy URLs for my application. Those URLs had to be using
domains that had bee pre-registered with Google. The only domain where
I have a web page is at panix.com, and that domain isn't pre-
registered with Google. I don't own that domain, so I'm not going to
try to pre-register it with Google.

I could continue to read the list with slrn, but post using something
like Thunderbird, but do I really want to set up a whole new MUA just
for one mailing list? [The other 20+ mailing lists I follow are all
happy with posts from gmane.]

-- 
Grant