[alisonsandy]

Any decent 3rd party client does this already. Take for example, thunderbird or k9-mail - major open source ones. Even Mail (from Apple, macOS) does this. What else you need? Sure if you use mutt or ALPINE read the related forums for help.

while anyone can criticise any large company one should do it for the correct reasons.

[jonathanstrange]

Your frankly-speaking somewhat condescending reply fails to address the issue. This has nothing to do with the client software, which is claws-mail in this case. My organization does not enable 2-factor authentication. Once they do, claws-mail can be configured to use "App passwords."

But if you look at my other post, quotes of Google's own documentation of "App passwords" and various testimony in this thread do not inspire much confidence that this will work as an acceptable long-term solution. As I said elsewhere, the rationale behind all of this seems to be anti-competitive behavior. It's not new idea to disguise anti-competitive behavior as security issues (cf. e.g. Apple's code signing and Gatekeeper). This also explains the misleading and incorrect term "Less Secure Apps" Google uses.