In Evolution mail and GNOME accounts, we currently only support a handful of OAuth2 providers, such as Microsoft and Google. This is rather unfortunate, as it causes vendor lock-in, and means people like me (who host third-party email services) cannot use a custom OAuth2 instance in our EMail clients.
Furthermore, It would be nice to have support for third-party OAuth2 in Gnome-Online-Accounts as well. Perhaps a standardized XML format for GoaBackend could help to make this happen, though it may be difficult to implement.
I think it would be fine, personally, to just have third-party OAuth2 support in Evolution for IMAP and SMTP.
The groundwork is already there in the form of Evolution EWS, but I think it would not be very difficult to provide a more generic OAuth2 system, where the bearer token is sent via XOAuth2 (which is already used for Google account login).
(I sent this through mail originally, but it has got lost on the route; maybe it’ll be received another day, just do not be surprised if yes).
On Mon, 2024-11-04 at 19:05 +0100, Arzumify via GNOME Discourse wrote:
I think it would be fine, personally, to just have third-party OAuth2
support in Evolution for IMAP and SMTP.
Hi,
I cannot speak of the gnome-online-accounts, but for the Evolution, you
can create a module, which will contain something like this:
and which is registered on proper places:
and that’s all.
I point to the EWS, because it’s an out of tree example. The evolution-
data-server sources contain more EOAuth2ServiceBase descendants, which
are simpler than the one in the EWS (it’s for outlook.com addresses
IMAP+SMTP, Google and Yahoo!).
Please note this is not about vendor lock-in, as you named it, the
OAuth2 requires special considerations and some also specific arguments
and usually a client ID (and a client secret) of an app registered on
the (OAuth2) server, thus there is involved a manual work out of the
source code to make it work for the users.