Comment 12 for bug 1421923

Thanks Niklas for your excellent work! I've read your blog post, and quickly had a look at the account-polld code. I have a few remarks, which I'm presenting in a strictly random order :-)

- You don't need to create an account plugin for GMail. GMail uses the google account, so for GMail account-polld can simply ship a .service file containing the needed imap parameters
- GMail can use OAuth: https://developers.google.com/gmail/oauth_overview (you can have a look at Dekko's code for details)
- Stressing the above point :-) I believe that OAuth is almost a must, if you want to support 2-factor authentication (I know there are ways around it, but they are not convenient for the user, and OAuth offers better security)
- But yes, we can have a generic IMAP plugin for other account types
- Online Accounts offers an account plugin for SASL. It's not packaged to Ubuntu, but only because no application has used it so far. We can add it, the code is here: https://gitlab.com/accounts-sso/signon-plugin-sasl/tree/master (I'm not sure whether this will make your life easier or harder, since this plugin, unlike all the others, is interactive: the client should invoke it every time a challenge is received from the server -- but I thought I'd mention it anyways)
- I see a lot of data files in your branch, probably related to character encoding; I wonder if you could use a library instead? Maybe GLib offers the functionality you need?