Google withdrawing "less secure app" access to Gmail

I wanted to give a heads up to everyone (including the lovely folks over at R-Comp) that Google are withdrawing access to Gmail from “less secure” third party apps from 30th May 2022. !Messenger relies on this feature for access to Gmail, so as things stand, afaik that will leave us only with webmail access via Iris to Gmail accounts on the RiscOS platform.

I don’t use !Organiser, but I imagine this will also apply to Google calaneder access for Organiser users :(

All in all, a bit of a step backwards for our platform :(

Only if you use Gmail :-)

True, but a lot of people do (either by choice or, like me, because we’re tied into the wider Google ecosystem). The January build of Iris is much faster on Google services, which is a plus, but it does still limit us to webmail only.

Extra info btw: This only applies to personal Google accounts. Coroporate envrionment users (Workspace) are unaffected for now,

afaik that will leave us only with webmail access via Iris to Gmail accounts on the RiscOS platform.

AFAIK, if you set up 2 step authentication for Gmail and then set up an application password and use that in Messenger/Hermes then it will still work post 30th May 2022.

What I think is being stopped is user/user generated password access via a “less secure app”

Note that an application password is generated once and therefore you need to ensure you keep a copy or enter in to Messenger/Hermes at the time it is generated.

Also of course you need to initially access Gmail by the web interface and hence IRIS or a PC/Linux/MacOS is required for that step.

This is likely to mostly be of concern for people unwisely logging into GMail using their Google account and password.

If this stops working, you may be able to set up an app specific password to allow the client to continue to connect to GMail without going through the special login process that Google is trying to inflict upon everybody ¹.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833

Edit: was whinging about browser brokenness so much that Doug got in ahead of me. ;)

¹ If you detect some venom in that, it’s because that crap consistently fails to work with Firefox, timing me out before I’ve even had a chance to see the notification; and they block the use of their own Chrome browser if it’s even a millisecond out of date…and I don’t like updating Chrome as they mess with the UI all the bloody time, like WTactualF have they done with the tabs? ² Now they’re in “groups” (with no way to disable this nonsense), I can’t find anything.

² To be fair, the new versions of Firefox also have broken tabs, it seems utterly incapable of opening links, shortcuts, and bookmarks in the same tab.

Hi Rick – thanks for that, useful to know :)

A simple solution to stop Gugol messing about with email is to use something else: registering a personal domain name is simple enough and then you have complete control over how the mail is handled. And you won’t have Gugol collecting your data.

registering a personal domain name is simple enough

Yes, it’s pretty simple but it’s not free. For those who just “want an email address for the odd thing” (like all those government things that are online these days) a freebie provider like Google will suffice.

you have complete control over how the mail is handled

Only if you physically manage your own server, but that’s an entirely different sort of hosting and outside of the remit of most people’s skills or patience. I know, because my friend in London did it, and I take my hat off to him for the never ending battle against spammers and bots.

For your average domain name, you typically have a managed solution which is one or more email boxes, which might permit aliases (though it’ll all end up at the same mailbox), that you can connect to via POP or IMAP. Usually encrypted, though sadly not always (sometimes things respond if you telnet to port 110). And each mailbox will have an allocation. These days 5GB upwards is normal.
This is likely what you mean, and is the closest thing to how GMail works, but it’s not “complete control”. Specifically you may find you have no controls over how the spam filter works, or even if there is one. Which could be a problem if it lets through too much junk (Yahoo!) or mistakes proper messages for spam (also Yahoo!).

And you won’t have Gugol collecting your data.

So long as you never communicate with anybody that uses GMail…

…but, then, these days it’s probably best to assume that everybody is collecting data unless you can demonstrate otherwise. Google, Apple, Microsoft, your ISP… they’re all at it because they can.

The EU has just passed the latest EU-US data sharing agreement, and until Schrems III tears it down as the enormous pile of llama guano that we all know it is (America? Privacy? That’s a joke!), it’s business as usual for our friendly transatlantic data fetishists.
Oh, and if you have a Samsung (etc) then Korea is watching. If a Xiaomi (etc), then China is watching. Etc etc etc. And if you’re at all notable or important then you might have been of interest to the “totally innocent nothing to do with us” Israeli outfit NSO. You might have heard of them recently…

So there’s about seven billion people that know I’m utterly uninteresting. A mere pathetic little data point wasting space in some database buried under a mountain in Utah. And another in Guangxi. And…. ;)