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Comment by icefog | Hacker News Reader

Does mutt support oauth yet? If not, this will be the last straw for G Suite from me. I can sort-of understand turning off "less secure" apps in consumer Gmail, but forcing "security" requirements for private, paid enterprise accounts is ludicrous. Time to find a provider which treats me as a grown-up capable of independent security risk judgement.

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Yes. This was my initial concern, but it looks like it's a simple process of running a script:

https://luxing.im/mutt-integration-with-gmail-using-oauth/

eh? using your g suite password for email is a huge mistake. the problem isn't the password auth per se, it's that the permissions you grant if the password is exposed are vast, not limited to just sending/receiving email.

that said, why they insist on turning it off, rather than just use ASPs, is a bit unfriendly. but it's definitely not because they are treating you as a child.

Not if the sole purpose of that account is email and nothing more. I should be able to make decisions about what an account is used for and how to authenticate, even if that's the "wrong" or "less-secure" decision.

That's a complex (more than necessary) product roadmap, to support the negligible percentage of users that can actually use it "securely". When it comes to security, the typical user leans towards making the wrong choices given the freedom to do so.

You also aren't being denied the capability. There are seemingly innumerable mail hosting services that will let you do IMAP with normal password. You can also host it yourself, using gmail as relay service if you desire.

I built a pine-like mail client that uses the GMail API: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's what I've used to read and write email every day for the last year or two, so it's past that point.

Patches welcome. :-)

Are there any decent alternatives to G Suite that support out of the box email hosting?

plenty. https://lmgtfy.com/?q=email+hosting+providers

fastmail.fm seems well regarded. (it's not on the first page of results above)

For email you can import your gmail account via IMAP to fastmail. I have a custom domain so it's been awesome to finally serve mail from it and a relatively painless transition.

The problem I've been having with this is that most of these alternative providers don't offer much space, even on their most expensive plan. My GMail storage use is around 300GB right now. Sure I could probably clean that up if I wanted to, but I don't. I'd rather just pay for 400GB of space, with options to go much higher as time goes on.

Fastmail's most expensive plan offers 100GB, and most alternative providers seem to max out in this range (or lower). Mailbox.org is the only thing that I've found that is (or at least claims to be) privacy-respecting that offers lots of space.

On a side note, given some of the anti-privacy and anti-encryption legislation passed in Australia in the last couple years, I'm not sure Fastmail would be my first choice to replace Google.

You can buy more storage at Fastmail: it's the same cost as an extra user to add the same amount of storage. e.g. for a Professional account, you can add an extra 100 GB storage for an extra $9/month.

Gmail reports a combined storage with Drive etc., so you may find not all of your quota use is actually email.

You can try Migadu, which is priced by number of outgoing emails per day and not by storage or domains or mailboxes. The company is in Switzerland, but it uses a data center in France. I personally have very limited experience with the service, and cannot give either a strong yes or no for it.

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