[sylpheed:36769] Using two-factor MFA and OAuth2 tokens with sylpheed

[Ranjan Maitra]

Hello,

I am a long-time sylpheed user since about the early part of the 2000s (I can't recall from when). I have survived several attempts by the powers that be to add several layers of trouble but still managed to hang on to sylpheed. (I did use sylpheed-claws for a while also but came back to sylpheed).

However, the IT folks at my university have decided to show that they are even more relevant and decided to require multifactor authentication with a token (which I gather is different from the other post here from a few days ago). This brings my entire ability to read e-mail on sylpheed to a thundering stop.

The IT folks in my department below the supervisory level have actually been generally very helpful and have found that evolution is a possible alternative for linux users. They have actually written a pretty detailed set of notes for RHEL which I am told also applies to Fedora 29+ (which is what I use). The instructions are: https://www.stat.iastate.edu/evolution-mail-linux-users

My question is: can sylpheed be modified to handle such a case. If so, how? I am happy to contribute to plugins and the like but I am not sure I have the understanding of what all this will entail.

I am also interested in continuing to use sylfilter (I am after all, also its maintainer on Fedora) because it would be good to continue to use a package I maintain.

Any advice (including alternative approaches to get and more importantly send e-mail) would be very appreciated.

Many thanks and best wishes,
Ranjan