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by Satam 845 days ago
To use Google's sensitive APIs in production you have to certify your product and that costs tens of thousands. To be honest, didn't think about imap at first, but it looks like that could be getting tougher soon too https://support.google.com/a/answer/14114704?hl=en. Soon they will require oAuth for imap and with oAuth you'll need the certification: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/xoauth2-protocol. If it's for personal use, you might be able to get by with just with some warnings in the login flow but it won't be easy to get oAuth flow setup in the first place.
2 comments
noduerme 845 days ago
Yeah, Thunderbird integrated oAuth in the last few releases, mainly to keep up with the Gmail and Hotmail requirements. Made it very user-friendly to set up in the GUI right within T-bird. I don't see this being a major obstacle.

I'm not sure I can imagine a scenario in production where Google would, or should, allow API access to individual gmail accounts. What's that for? So you can read all your employees' mail without running your own email server?

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akerl_ 845 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean.

> You will no longer use a password for access (with the exception of app passwords)

I'm not seeing anywhere that I'd need to pay money to use OAuth via an app like Thunderbird or another email client. That app would either need to support using OAuth to let the user auth and get credentials, or use an app password.

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Satam 845 days ago
Right, but Thunderbird had to pay up and set themselves as a middleman to allow this. My point is that local LLMs might not have that many advantages for personal data because most of that data doesn't live locally on your computer, to begin with. I guess an argument could be made that running them locally prevents an AI provider from gobbling up ALL of your data. On the other hand, Google already has most of our my data: emails, youtube, gmail, etc.
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