Are there any PPC email clients which will be able to continue using Gmail after 30 May 2022?

[eyoungren]

Does Entourage even support imap which is what I use ?

IMAP is a standard email protocol introduced in 1986. Every major email app supports it. There are OS7/8/9 email apps that support it. What you can run into though is security protocols and certificates.

For example, I do not use my IMAP email on Entourage 2008 anymore (the one from my ISP) because Cox has done something security wise that prevents it from connecting.

But Outlook 2011, 2016 and 2019 on my Intel Macs still work

 

[barracuda156]

I wonder if either libfido2 and/or pan-u2f are needed for that.

libfido2 fails on this atm:

[ 29%] Generating rs256_pk_to_EVP_PKEY.3
cd /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_security_libfido2/libfido2/work/build/man && ln -sf rs256_pk_new.3 rs256_pk_to_EVP_PKEY.3
make[2]: Leaving directory `/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_security_libfido2/libfido2/work/build'
[ 29%] Built target man_symlink
make[1]: Leaving directory `/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_security_libfido2/libfido2/work/build'
make: *** [all] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_security_libfido2/libfido2/work/build'
Command failed:  cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_security_libfido2/libfido2/work/build" && /usr/bin/make -j4 -w all VERBOSE=ON 
Exit code: 2

But probably can be fixed to build.

 

[cellularmitosis]

The question is why are they doing this ?

Using a browser for OAuth 2 login is now considered a “best practice”: https://auth0.com/blog/amp/oauth-2-best-practices-for-native-apps/

If you dig into that article, as well as the RFC it mentions: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8252.txt

you’ll see there are basically two claims being made:
- it provides “better” security
- it provides more features, ie single sign-on (using google auth, Facebook sith, Sign In with Apple, etc)

I looked into the details the other day, because we are debating between two auth approaches at work for our app:
- traditional approach: custom UI with email / password fields
- launch a webview and do OAuth 2.0

I’ll agree that the OAuth approach does give you more features. Tapping “sign in with google” and re-using an existing cookie without typing in your password again is pretty convenient.

However, I personally disagree with the “better security” claim. You’ll notice in the “best practice” article that they vaguely describe it as “better” without actually getting specific. If you dig into the RFC, you’ll see that this basically all boils down to “the application code never gets access to the user’s password, only the browser gets access to the password”.

As someone who’s job it is to write the application code, I’ll admit I’m a bit miffed by the claim that this is “better”. But I guess I can understand it from the perspective of someone using a binary app which they don’t trust and can’t see the source.

What’s funny to me is the way this is spun though. Naively using a webview for auth actually introduced a vulnerability (redirects can be hijacked by another app), for which they had to invent the “PKCE” mechanism, which made hijacked redirects useless. In my mind, that’s a perfect example that making things more complex is never a good idea (ie, the old email / password approach is a lot simpler, pretty hard to screw up a single HTTPS POST request).

Anyway, rant over.

Btw my phone is hot to the touch after browsing this forum for 5 minutes. Hope that advertiser is enjoying the bitcoin I probably just mined for them ?

 

[cosmogfd]

I don't have much to add, besides not using ProtonMail if you do switch from Gmail. They've proven themselves untrustworthy. Not that you should inherently trust any other email service, but ProtonMail is the one that publicly doxxed (as in, we know about it, not that they posted their dox online) a climate activist for so much as squatting in a bildimg.​

No they haven't, stop being ridiculous. They handed over data that they were legally obliged to hand over, and all they were able to provide was logs because everything else was encrypted. No emails, no zip file with the user's inbox in it, etc.

You can't just refuse to comply with a court order because it doesn't suit you.

 

[pipetogrep]

Iris on MorphOS

Iris - The MorphOS Email Client

iris-morphos.com

 

[mectojic]

I don't know much about PPC clients or anything, but I've been consistently using the HTML browser version of Gmail for a year now. It's really fast and responsive, and still loads emails in full, with downloadable attachments. And it works even with Safari.
But I've never had the need for additional authorisation beyond just a password, so this may not be helpful to you.

 

[B S Magnet]

I don't know much about PPC clients or anything, but I've been consistently using the HTML browser version of Gmail for a year now. It's really fast and responsive, and still loads emails in full, with downloadable attachments. And it works even with Safari.
But I've never had the need for additional authorisation beyond just a password, so this may not be helpful to you.

Generally, if one has only a single Gmail account to check, the HTML display feature for the Gmail web page is reasonable and behaves much how Gmail always has in an HTML setting (going all the way back to 2004, in fact).

The convenience falls away when having to log out manually, then log in manually to more than one account. This is where having an email client application on one’s, say, desktop/laptop outweighs the cumbersome log-in/log-out/log-in/log-out/ad-nauseam steps one must follow if they want to check multiple accounts.

This is why I opened this thread: to find solutions, workarounds, and the like, as Google’s policy comes into force on 30 May.

 

[mectojic]

Generally, if one has only a single Gmail account to check, the HTML display feature for the Gmail web page is reasonable and behaves much how Gmail always has in an HTML setting (going all the way back to 2004, in fact).

The convenience falls away when having to log out manually, then log in manually to more than one account. This is where having an email client application on one’s, say, desktop/laptop outweighs the cumbersome log-in/log-out/log-in/log-out/ad-nauseam steps one must follow if they want to check multiple accounts.

This is why I opened this thread: to find solutions, workarounds, and the like, as Google’s policy comes into force on 30 May.

Another cheap, if slightly awkward solution would be to just have multiple different web browsers. As I said, HTML Gmail works on base Safari, so it should work on most outdated browsers. You could have Safari, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, OmniWeb, etc, all logged into different accounts.

 

[Macbookprodude]

This can work also on OS 8 or 9 using Netscape, IE5.1.7, or classila also ?

 

[B S Magnet]

Another cheap, if slightly awkward solution would be to just have multiple different web browsers. As I said, HTML Gmail works on base Safari, so it should work on most outdated browsers. You could have Safari, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, OmniWeb, etc, all logged into different accounts.

Yah, that’s pretty awkward and probably won’t be worth the hassle for me.


Sidebar, probably a commentary:

Gmail started, innocuously enough, as promoting a service to the semi-public (i.e., not solely Google staff, but initially via invites from Google staff connections) — one which, at first face in ’04, seemed to be a general good. When Google opened sign-up to anyone without invitation, this seemed, at first face, for the public good. Quickly, the commercial realm took advantage of this virtually free service as a cost-cutting measure of no longer having to budget for subscription-based email service providers or the need to having an on-site email server located in an on-site or co-located cold room.

From the outset, there was more to that bargain than what Google presented originally. Or, to some extent, the roots of that bargain were implied from the outset, but not (yet) outright exercised.

Whether intended or not, the might of the company, with its reach extending to anyone who signed up for their first email account, empowered it to release further services, like the Chrome browser in ’08, for their product (i.e., the users). As Chrome assumed a position of being the most commonly used browser across all platforms, Google found themselves in a rare place to be able to shape web-wide policy and set standards on their own without the need for W3C/web consortium-based consensus or industry standardization. This, consequently, has allowed them to set their own standards for services they offer — such as email. Those standards may not be web-wide standards, but there is not much other parties, even coalesced, can do to countermand Google’s unilateral decisions.

That, I think, brings us to this awkward moment in which Google’s proprietary and industry might over email access for doubtlessly hundreds of millions of users (if not more) — and, to lesser extent in an enterprise realm, Microsoft — is permitting the company to re-engineer the basic means in which email, a standard established decades before Gmail was launched (and even before the WWW), is to be retrieved.

The basic username/password premise (originally sans encryption, later bolstered with SSL-based schemes like STARTTLS and Kerberos as, admittedly, fixes) and mechanism of sending/retrieving email, with this move, aims to re-engineer a standard which suits Google’s business needs — not a standard which suits the established, non-proprietary standard of the protocol. This is supported by Google’s introduction of the Titan Security Key (which, while based on a new industry model for encryption, is a proprietary component) as a physical retail product, as a proprietary layer for retrieving longtime, legacy services like email.

I don’t like where this is headed, but I’m just some rando on the internet who’s posting this take on a forum board. I am also seen occasionally as one who shouts at the clouds.

(End of sidebar.)

 

[wicknix]

Iris - The MorphOS Email Client

iris-morphos.com

"verified by google"

 

[Dronecatcher]

From the outset, there was more to that bargain than what Google presented originally. Or, to some extent, the roots of that bargain were implied from the outset, but not (yet) outright exercised.

I was an early advocate of Google and jumped ship to Gmail from a paid subscription of .Mac (which was having poor uptime at that point.)

Even though at the time, I knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, I went along with it and persuaded a lot of friends and colleagues to do the same - something I deeply regret.

I could never have predicted people's worldview would be dominated so much by a search engine - maybe it would've been the same whoever became top of the pile...we'll never know if the folks behind Ask Jeeves would've bolted moral blinkers onto all their staff in the future too...

 

[barracuda156]

But probably can be fixed to build.

I have fixed the build of libfido2:

36-109% port -v installed libfido2
The following ports are currently installed:
  libfido2 @1.9.0_1 (active) requested_variants='' platform='darwin 10' archs='ppc' date='2022-03-30T07:32:22+0800'

There is only one dependency of libfido2 in Macports, and I could build it too after a minor modification. So provisionally it works (however some functionality may fail).

 

[max lippe]

Buried in my spam box this afternoon, I found a repetitive email warning from Google (repetitive, in that the same message was sent to the multiple Gmail accounts I’ve set up since 2004).

The warning, in short, is Google is making OAuth 2.0 a mandatory function of accessing one’s Gmail email from outside the (heavy) confines of the Gmail web page, effective 30 May 2022:

View attachment 1973574


This shift, of course, is going to leave a lot of email clients high and dry across several platforms (OS X/macOS, Windows, etc.) and architectures (PowerPC, Intel, and even Apple Silicon).

For me, this hits the use of the same (and preferred) email client I’ve used since ’04, GyazMail, on not only the PowerPC side, but also on the Intel side (as even the latest, 64-bit build of GyazMail, released 2021, compatible with Apple Silicon running Monterey, presently does not support OAuth 2.0). Other third-party email clients may be facing a similar situation.

[Personally, I will need to shift my email management away from Gmail as much as I can. It’s something I should have done long ago anyway, but this is probably the prompt to get me off my duff and actually map out a long-term working plan. (I do have my own domain hosting, but I also know many do not have that affordance.) That plan, in my situation, will mean closing mostly-dormant Gmail accounts I’ve had kicking around for ages; updating web services which rely on those accounts; and for the rest, forwarding Gmail to my own hosted domain’s email accounts.

Google’s compulsory shift will be a heft of a pain for everyone who relies on not only tried-and-true legacy email clients which have never failed them, but possibly also the reliable hardware on which that software depends. It may lock out most paths when originating from a PowerPC setting, which is why I’m posting this here.

tl;dr: This thread is to help bring the many brilliant minds of our community together to begin to aggregate known methods and possibly lesser-known email clients which may continue to run in a PowerPC Mac (or even a PowerPC Linux) setting, and which will also support OAuth 2.0 — provided, of course, there are paths for doing so. These paths will come in handy for anyone who must still rely on Gmail for their email needs (I imagine that will be a lot of us who read this).


Last bit: Allowing for how many solutions are offered by the PowerPC/early Intel community, I may open this into a WikiPost. We’ll see how it goes.

Hi
I read your post only now
I still use mac 10.9.4 and works perfectly for my needs
Unfortunatly since 30 may 2022 Mail doesn't connect with gmail
Has anybody found a solution for this?
Thanks

 

[B S Magnet]

Hi
I read your post only now
I still use mac 10.9.4 and works perfectly for my needs
Unfortunatly since 30 may 2022 Mail doesn't connect with gmail
Has anybody found a solution for this?
Thanks

As far as I know, there is no solution.

GyazMail, as of today (2 June), stopped being able to use POP3 retrieval for my gmail accounts.

This means needing to finish setting up a forwarding system of all gmail to my personal hosted email server — in the short run, it’s a minor hassle to set up and manage the transition with contacts and logins, but with Google’s move now complete, it needs to be done.

UPDATE: Inexplicably, my gmail accounts are working again, at least for the moment. I cannot explain why, unless Google temporarily paused their termination of the “less secure apps” option, given probably how many products (i.e., customers, users, people, orgs) depend on classic email applications which rely solely on internet-standard POP3/IMAP/SMTP authentication. When, as, and/or if this changes again, I’ll post a second update here.

Just to give some perspective on how my email client handles authentication, it’s pretty straightforward and doesn’t involve system-guided features endemic to more recent versions of OS X/macOS, vis-à-vis System Preferences > Internet Accounts (which, of course, doesn’t exist on Snow Leopard and earlier):

I have a version of this email client which will run on 10.5.8 for PowerPC (screen cap above) and a 64-bit Intel version which works on Snow Leopard, upward to Monterey (though I’ve used it on nothing higher than High Sierra).

 

[max lippe]

As far as I know, there is no solution.

GyazMail, as of today (2 June), stopped being able to use POP3 retrieval for my gmail accounts.

This means needing to finish setting up a forwarding system of all gmail to my personal hosted email server — in the short run, it’s a minor hassle to set up and manage the transition with contacts and logins, but with Google’s move now complete, it needs to be done.

I think i find a solution
i was able to download a mail client that works on my OS
It s called POST BOX
So far works perfectly...
It s a program recognised by google as respecting the new security standards

 

[katbel]

Buried in my spam box this afternoon, I found a repetitive email warning from Google (repetitive, in that the same message was sent to the multiple Gmail accounts I’ve set up since 2004).

The warning, in short, is Google is making OAuth 2.0 a mandatory function of accessing one’s Gmail email from outside the (heavy) confines of the Gmail web page, effective 30 May 2022:

View attachment 1973574

We received the same warning few times as well. Still using Mojave.

Since then we decided to move away from Gmail: alternatives we found are ProtonMail and or Tutanota
Beside HideMyEmails from iCloud for all those websites were you will never answer them back.

It's a painful switch that I'm doing without pressure little by little and I feel great.
Of course I moved in one day the ones " super necessary"
then the others before the end of May
Didn't delete the Gmail accounts yet, but in the VIP ones I left a vacancy note where I explain how to remove
the old Gmail from both Mac and iOS and to call me in case they need help
without of course leaving the new email or my phone # , who know us is already in contact with us ?.

I prefer to pay a little than being with Google at this point.
Both alternatives let you have free accounts to try them out, in case you don't know them yet.
So far so good, actually I'm impressed by the speed of checking my email compared to Gmail in Apple mail
for Proton. Tutanota requires a different app but it's easy to export to AppleMail if you need it.

 

[B S Magnet]

We received the same warning few times as well. Still using Mojave.

Since then we decided to move away from Gmail: alternatives we found are ProtonMail and or Tutanota
Beside HideMyEmails from iCloud for all those websites were you will never answer them back.

It's a painful switch that I'm doing without pressure little by little and I feel great.
Of course I moved in one day the ones " super necessary"
then the others before the end of May
Didn't delete the Gmail accounts yet, but in the VIP ones I left a vacancy note where I explain how to remove
the old Gmail from both Mac and iOS and to call me in case they need help
without of course leaving the new email or my phone # , who know us is already in contact with us ?.

I prefer to pay a little than being with Google at this point.
Both alternatives let you have free accounts to try them out, in case you don't know them yet.
So far so good, actually I'm impressed by the speed of checking my email compared to Gmail in Apple mail
for Proton. Tutanota requires a different app but it's easy to export to AppleMail if you need it.

I do have a solitary protonmail account reserved for very specific, very limited use — namely, all management of my virtual hosting services route there. For that account, I don’t have an issue with pulling up a browser tab to check my inbox, which I do maybe once monthly.

As for the gmail accounts (heck, my first one, which I still have, went active on 6 June 2004!), this migration to my virtual hosting email isn’t so much the headache as much as it is all the rarely-used web sites whose login requires an email address (which, for me, is typically one of the gmail accounts). Even accounting for the logins of the last, say, three years, that’s still going to be a lot of remedial, “fix-and-update-as-they-come-up” situations. That could go on for a while.

It’s probably for the best: weaning from Google services is probably healthy online praxis in the long run.

 

[Hughmac]

The strangest thing - I have 2 gmail accounts set up on the Apple Mail app in 10.5.8 on my Pismo G4, and I can still send and receive on both.

I've not altered anything since the end of May deadline, so I have no explanation.

However, due to Mail in the Sorbet installation on my iMac G4 totally failing to connect, I made both a TenFourFoxBox and a @wicknix InTheBox Gmail app, which work perfectly, plus each one has a custom icon.
I've attached them both for those who might find them useful...

Cheers

Hugh

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Does anyone have any experience with this?

I want to transfer all my emails and old data from old Google account to a new one. Would that be possible?

How to Merge Gmail Accounts

There’s no need to juggle multiple email accounts when you can combine them into one.

www.pcmag.com

 

[Hughmac]

The strangest thing - I have 2 gmail accounts set up on the Apple Mail app in 10.5.8 on my Pismo G4, and I can still send and receive on both.

I've not altered anything since the end of May deadline, so I have no explanation.

However, due to Mail in the Sorbet installation on my iMac G4 totally failing to connect, I made both a TenFourFoxBox and a @wicknix InTheBox Gmail app, which work perfectly, plus each one has a custom icon.
I've attached them both for those who might find them useful...

Cheers

Hugh

I can confirm that Gmail through the Apple Mail app on Snow Leopard (iMac C2D) is also working perfectly at the moment, so I will do some more testing on the G4 iMac's Tiger and Leopard partitions tomorrow, then query it on the Sorbet thread

Cheers

Hugh

 

[katbel]

I do have a solitary protonmail account reserved for very specific, very limited use — namely, all management of my virtual hosting services route there. For that account, I don’t have an issue with pulling up a browser tab to check my inbox, which I do maybe once monthly.

As for the gmail accounts (heck, my first one, which I still have, went active on 6 June 2004!), this migration to my virtual hosting email isn’t so much the headache as much as it is all the rarely-used web sites whose login requires an email address (which, for me, is typically one of the gmail accounts). Even accounting for the logins of the last, say, three years, that’s still going to be a lot of remedial, “fix-and-update-as-they-come-up” situations. That could go on for a while.

It’s probably for the best: weaning from Google services is probably healthy online praxis in the long run.

If you are willing to go with a Proton paid account, it has a bridge access that sends all your emails to Apple Mail automatically.
Probably not worth it if you use that email randomly. But for an everyday use it works well, even with multiple aliases.

I created few rules for each account/alias and when Apple Mail is in a good mood , automatically moves the email to the specific folders in Mail. To know that they have been moved I added to the folder name a little colorful emoji before its name. The folder is " On My Mac"
Examples: travel emails have ✈️ Travel, iCloud emails ⛅ iCloud
Each email will show their location on my computer.
If they have been moved, on the right of each email you can see

If Mail doesn't move the emails I will just select the recent emails and press
Command-Option-L and they will be moved

Hide My Email requires an iCloud+ subscription. The minimum is
1$ a month for 50 Gb. I cannot create new Hidden emails for each website on Mojave ,
but I can on iPhone or iPad were I create all needed new emails , then copy and paste them in Mojave

 

[B S Magnet]

If you are willing to go with a Proton paid account, it has a bridge access that sends all your emails to Apple Mail automatically.
Probably not worth it if you use that email randomly. But for an everyday use it works well, even with multiple aliases.

I’ve flirted with the possibility of going with a paid Protonmail plan, if only because then I could POP3/IMAP grab from GyazMail.

I created few rules for each account/alias and when Apple Mail is in a good mood , automatically moves the email to the specific folders in Mail. To know that they have been moved I added to the folder name a little colorful emoji before its name. The folder is " On My Mac"
Examples: travel emails have ✈️ Travel, iCloud emails ⛅ iCloud

I admit I migrated from Eudora (my email client during the OS 9 and Panther days) directly over to GyazMail, as GyazMail offered a core feature from Eudora I loved (more or less allowing the user to mirror the UI/UX configuration of Eudora) and also had a feature Eudora lacked (saving emails as individual files, not as a corruptible database, the latter which I faced and what sent me looking for a successor).

I never really gave Apple Mail a chance because it fundamentally lacked the UX I preferred for reading and writing email. To this day, I even have GyazMail render all incoming mail as plaintext, and my compose windows remain the same 78-char (fitting in an 80-column setup of email clients like pine, on which I wrote my first email back in the mid ’90s).

Hide My Email requires an iCloud+ subscription. The minimum is
1$ a month for 50 Gb. I cannot create new Hidden emails for each website on Mojave ,
but I can on iPhone or iPad were I create all needed new emails , then copy and paste them in Mojave

Also admittedly, I’ve never used .Mac/iCloud. The extent of my voluntary cloud storage is Dropbox.

 

[Hughmac]

I can confirm that Gmail through the Apple Mail app on Snow Leopard (iMac C2D) is also working perfectly at the moment, so I will do some more testing on the G4 iMac's Tiger and Leopard partitions tomorrow, then query it on the Sorbet thread

Cheers

Hugh

Scrap all that; Mail in Sorbet is now working perfectly - carry on...

Cheers

Hugh

 

[originaldotexe]

you should be able to enable 2fa and then make an app specific password. i dont have "less secure apps" enabled in my gmail and i can still sign in with my email clients using app specific passwords.