Few days ago, as I was trying to refresh my emails, I realize that Thunderbird (Thunderbird 78.11.0) was no longer able to retrieved my mails from Gmail. I tried to understand what was the problem but I wasn’t able to figure it out. After a while, I decided to uninstall Thunderbird and reinstall it. Things just got worst I couldn’t set any of my email accounts. For my Gmail, I tried to use OAuth2, as it is recommended (it used to work for me), but the identification protocol did not work: instead of getting the Gmail interface to login, I got an error message pointing out a lack of security (NS_ERROR_NET_INADEQUATE_SECURITY)… As I did not understand why, I decided to stop speeding time on trying to find the origin of the problem. All I can say if that it should be related with the latest patch, 78.11.0-1 (and my setup, I guess).

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$ apt policy thunderbird
thunderbird:
 Installed: 1:78.11.0-1
 Candidate: 1:78.11.0-1
 Version table:
*** 1:78.11.0-1 500
       500 http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
       100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

As I much prefer to use email client, I went the easy way and I set up another one! I opted for Evolution that was already installed on my machine. For my Gmail account it went smoothly, For my Yahoo account, I had to set up an application password (it’s in the security panel in the email interface) and looks like this is how the normal password should be used (it did not work with the actual password). I am not sure that I understand all of this correctly and I certainly do not understand why it should all so complicated to setup a email client…

To end this post I would like to mention that even if they may not always be the easiest way to process your emails, CLI email clients are also an option. I actually gave a go to himalaya, written in Rust, and I was amazed: it took me literally 2 minutes to set it up, and it is super easy to use. I can definitively see myself using it on a regular basis, we shall see!