webmail and email from command line

[loredana <llcfree@gmail.com>]

I find increasily difficult and error prone to read/send email via a
browser and would like to either use emacs (preferred, now that it
talks) or the command line.

'Though I managed to send mail to my gmail account by allowing less
secure applications, this is likely not to be a viable solution (it
seems that google is going to forbit less secure application access
starting November first of this year and it is already a pain to use
it now).

Two factor authentication may well be the only solution for desktop
users in a couple of months time.

Your Institution willl have somebody solving this issue for you, but
at home normal users who prefer to avoid using a browser for email are
on their own.

Once the authentication issue is solved, then any client (not only a
browser) should be able to read/send mail, making life for me and
possibly other visually impaired people easier.

Here is what I plan to do:

1) use mbsync to fetch mail locally

2) use any tool to read/edit mail locally (I will use emacs and mu4e,
bt at this point any editor and mail agent able to  work with mail
locally should be just fine)

3) configure exim to deal with gmail authentication to read and send
mail via smtp gmail server.

Is this a reasonable approach? Any comment or suggestion? Any other
way of dealing with email locally, without a browser and to use the
network only for reading/sending mail with an acceptable
authorization?

BTW, swacks is in debian and it is a very nice tool to test smtp
connections from the command line:

swaks --tls --auth --to <username>@gmail.com --server smtp.gmail.com

Be careful with spoken passwords ..
Loredana