webmail and email from command line

[loredana <llcfree@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

I posted the following message to debian-accessibility and I post it
again suggested.

Briefly, I am a "long term" debian user (since debian potato) and I am
almost but not completely blind. This happened recently, so I am still
adapting to the new situation. Please keep this in mind, as it is the
primary problem for us.

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, thanks to speechd-el) 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:

* use mbsync to fetch mail locally

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

* configure exim to deal with gmail authentication to read and send
mail via smtp gmail server frpm localhost.

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 imap/smtp server
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