As most of you know, we here at the Irreal bunker try to use Emacs for as much as we can. That includes, of course, email. I use the excellent mu4e for that and communicate with my email provider with mbsync. But my situation is easy. All my email funnels through my Apple account and I have no problem communicating with their mail server.
Others aren’t so lucky. They use Gmail or need to interface with Outlook because of work. It’s possible to get Mbsync or something similar working in those cases but it’s not, apparently, easy. Part of that is the increasing security measures that Google and Microsoft keep adding to their email systems and, probably, some of it is about user lock in.
Over at the Emacs subreddit, ttlaxia asks if there are any email providers that still work with Emacs. If you’re having the same problem, you should take a look at the answers. Some of them answer ttlaxia’s question directly and suggest email providers that simply support imap and make it easy to download your email.
Others answer the implied question: how do I get an Emacs email reader to work with Gmail or (possibly) Outlook? There are, it turns out, several good answers to that question so if you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of having to use Gmail or Outlook and would like to read your email with Emacs, take a look at the post. There’s a lot of good information especially for Gmail users