[Alpine-info] Seeking someone who..?

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

With the configuration people had been using for alpine, users now open
alpine to a blank folder with no mail in it, I've told them to use the c
key to change directory and then they see a new "Gmail" folder, they can
now go there to find there mail, one man found hundreds of emails he didn't
know existed.

The steps required to remove the encryption key from alpine are too
involved for many of the blind users who have been depending upon alpine to
access email.  Most of those I correspond with have moved on to mutt which
doesn't have this problem.

I have no idea how anyone could access email on a person's computer and
access third parties information in the email delivered to a person. I also
have no idea how an application master password prevents this, and I'm
positive the people I help who know much less about computers than I do
know even less about this.  All they want is a way to read their email
easily.  They could use Thunderbird to access their email and other
person's email would be on their computer, I don't see how this is any
different than the emails downloaded by alpine.  Thunderbird doesn't use an
application master password, the only thing that has a password is the
person's email accounts.

Maybe I don't understand these things because I'm not a hacker - not
implying that anyone who does understand them is a hacker - or someone with
better training than myself.

Carlos, maybe you are making alpine for ultimate email security, and for
some users, I can see that being a wonderful thing, but there is a group
dependent on the simple and effective way alpine used to work.  They've
been using alpine for years and they absolutely love it, but it's suddenly
become too complicated for them to use because of this master password
problem.

About the new /Gmail folder when they are accessing email, is there a new
.pinerc template available for them to use with gmail?  I'll gladly tell
them about this - and I will use it myself because if one could be produced
it will eliminate the step where I was using alpine and seeing i had zero
mail only to later discover that gmail had changed it's settings and that I
(and others) had to press c to change folders and there was a new Gmail
folder shown and now we have to go there to see our mail.  Also some people
are reporting that if they delete old mail, it doesn't get deleted by using
alpine.  I found this out myself with one person who trusts me and I
accessed his gmail account using his .pinerc file with alpine and deleted
hundreds of emails and then I used the gmail.com web page and used his
regular - not appliction specific password and the emails that I deleted
were all still there, hundreds of them.

I believe the .pinerc file they're all using is a descendant of the one
posted by the non abandoned Vinux for the blind Linux distribution from the
UK.  The best distro for accessibility right now is slint based on
slackware.  It also comes preconfigured with emacspeak which is a huge help
because most people - including myself can never get emacspeak configured
correctly in Debian.

Thanks,
David

On Fri, Dec 1, 2023 at 9:59 AM Eduardo Chappa <alpine.chappa at yandex.com>
wrote:


>

> > One of the problems they are having is with Gmail, they've managed to

> > get an application specific password, and can use alpine by using an old

> > version which does not have the master password, but Google has changed

> > the way email is displayed, what used to be the default was the INBOX of

> > their email, but now they have to change folders to one labeled Gmail

> > and inside there they have to select the folder with the new email.

>

> I am having a hard time understanding this. This seems like a

> configuration issue, not a Gmail issue. Are these people reading email by

> accessing it through a collection list? or do they read their email by

> configuring the inbox-path? (and maybe separately the collection list). If

> you need to skip [Gmail], add it to the collection list configuration.

>

> > It seems that it would be possible when configuring alpine to have a

> > switch much like the one that creates the ability to use the pinepass

> > file.

>

> I agree with you. This is not a technological requirement. It is a choice.

> Some people like me choose to make it mandatory, some people choose to use

> mutt instead, and some people choose to remove the password from the

> encryption key. We can all coexist in this world and make our choices. My

> choice does not force the choice of other people. I hope people that

> disagree with me choose to remove the password for the encryption key, not

> go to mutt, but that is their choice. After all removing the password from

> the encryption key will give them the experience they are looking for, and

> if they do not wish to do that, well, that is their choice too.

>

> --

> Eduardo

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