I spent a long day today trying to get my Cox e-mail working on my Librem 5. When I started, I didn’t know what I was in for. Hopefully I can save others some time here.
To start, a few months ago cox cable notified all of their customers who use cox email that everyone is being moved off of cox, like it or not, to a yahoo email account. Everyone gets to keep their “cox.net” email account name, but yahoo will become your ISP for email. The move to yahoo this morning (for me) was relatively easy on the server end. You log in to yahoo webmail using your cox email name and and password. A few hours later you get an email saying that the transition and migration message is complete on the server end. But after that, if you want to use any kind of third-party e-mail app, you’re in for some real hell to get it working. If you want to log in to the yahoo webmail forever to get your cox email, that is pretty painless.
I spent half of my day on my Librem 5 working with Geary and several other Librem 5 email apps before I realized that getting a good GUI on the L5 was the least of my technical problems. After trying several Linux email apps (including both Thunderbird and Evolution) unsuccessfully on my L5, I eventually gave up and moved to my Linux PC, figuring that I could at least get my email working again on Thunderbird on a desktop pc, just to make sure I could get my cox email from the yahoo servers from something more than only a web browser. After I couldn’t get Thunderbird to work on Ubuntu as I was sure should work, I started suspecting that something else was wrong. So I moved to my Windows 11 PC. That didn’t help either. I mean how hard should it be? Thunderbird sets everything up for you based on its understanding of what your ISP requires. I tried both the Cox and the Yahoo IMAP and SMTP settings. But nope, no success at all. For some reason, all my Android phone required was a third party email app and to select Yahoo from within that app, as the email provider during setup. An Oauth2 pop-up seems to be built in to the third party app. You agree to the yahoo terms and enter your email password and then the setup on your Android device is done.
When I called Cox tech support, they said to call Yahoo and they gave me a preferred cox customer phone number to Yahoo. I was on the phone for over an hour and a half before the Supervisor of the Yahoo employee who I started with, could get my email working on my Windows 11 PC using a remote login to my screen. The settings were extremely non-intuitive. It appears to take a big email client program like Thunderbird to make it work. So much for using my Cox email on Geary on the L5. You need to make port selections and enter different authentication types. Geary doesn’t even have a way to access those kinds of settings. You have to authenticate using something called OAuth2. During the setup process in Windows 11, a small web applet pops up, has you agree to some terms, and then you enter your password there in the aplet. After doing that during the setup, the software appears to stay permanently enabled.
So the question for Librem 5, Cox email users appears to be “where can I find an email program with access to advanced email settings and that also formats well on the Librem 5 screen?”. Is there some kind of tool or server I can run in the background that will access some of Geary’s under-the-hood settings to use Oauth2 authentication?
On my FreeBSD laptop I do use fetchmail to download my mails via IMAP from my mail accounts to a local mbox. I did so even from the MS Owa365 server. But when IT introduced Oauth2 I gave up some years ago. It seems that fetchmail now has extensions for Oauth2, read here: README.OAUTH2 · next · fetchmail / fetchmail · GitLab
Note also that the server could be configured to allow only known MUA clients. In this case you are out of any luck.
About five years ago, cox quit issuing new email accounts to its new internet custoners. If you already had existing cox email accounts, you could keep them. But you couldn’t get new ones issued, even by offering to pay extra for them. Then about two years ago, cox made a somewhat passive attempt to take away email accounts that appeared to be inactive. I had one account that I rarely used. One day I checked it and found a message from cox that was less than two weeks old and that said they were going to take that address back from me unless I notified them by the next day that I wanted to keep it. I often went months without using it and only discovered that message in time, by random luck. I kept a close eye on it after that through several similar attempts that followed, where cox tried over a period of months, to take that account away from me if I didn’t respond almost right away. With cox emails, all you needed until now were IMAP and SMTP server names, your email address, and password. Those days are over for those who still keep their cox email addresses now.
Wow guru. Your information is extremely valuable. If I knew I was playing in a war against Google for control of my own information, I wouldn’t have even tried so hard to set it up on my Windows 11 pc. Just moving away from Linux to Windows to get it working temporarily, seemed like a big compromise to begin with. I had planned to go back to Thunderbird on my Ubuntu PC and copy the settings from Thunderbird from the Windows installation, to move my email back to Linux. But not now, not if Google is using Oauth2 to make opensource software impractical to use in a constant war of security protocol changes that favor big tech.
It looks like I need a different email provider. I might be stuck using Protonmail from Proton’s proprietary app if it will install in Ubuntu. That’s probably the safest way to protect my data without whoring myself out to traditional big tech. At least with Proton, I pay them for their service service and they have the more credible claims that my data is safe and doesn’t get sold (weather true or not). I bought a higher tier of service with Proton to get better VPN service, and that higher tier came with a bunch of email addresses and calendars, more than I’ll ever use.
I use Proton Mail Bridge in conjunction with Thunderbird on Linux Mint. It allows me to split my various Proton email aliases into separate “accounts,” and to have all my email addresses (Proton and others) in one place: within Thunderbird.
I see that Proton Mail Desktop application has a .deb file download, so it should work on Ubuntu. I don’t know if it’ll work as an app on the L5, though. I’ve used Proton as a web app on the L5, and it adapted well, as I recall.
I tried using the Proton mail bridge in Ubuntu, to enable Protonmail with Thunderbird. I finally gave up because I have to manually enter my password, every time I bring up Thunderbird. If I recall correctly, the bridge password is quite long. Either that or I keep my Protonmail password quite long. As soon as I had to start looking for that password every time I opened Thunderbird, it became bothersome to use Thunderbird and the bridge. I like the idea of using the bridge, if it didn’t turn the checking of email in to a troubleshooting session every time.
I only have to enter it once into Thunderbird, and I just copy and paste it. It’s the same auto-generated password for all my alias addresses. Maybe you’re not setting Thunderbird to remember it…?
Now I have had to re-enter it on occasion, after a major Bridge update, I think, but otherwise it persists through most updates.
I use Oauth2 authentication with Thunderbird on Linux accessing Microsoft-hosted email - so while that is not Google, it does indicate that it can work with Big Tech. It’s a bit clunky but it does work, and it basically only has to work once. (To clarify a couple of points - this is desktop/laptop, not Librem 5 - and this is work-related, not my choice, I would never choose to deal with Google or Microsoft. I have never tried to get this email account working on the Librem 5, for kind of the same reasons that you are finding.)
It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Geary will one day support Oauth2. Firstly though I think Purism would have to push out Crimson, with hopefully a more current version of Geary.
The other day, Yahoo tech support helped me to get Thunderbird with Cox email installed and working on my Windows 11 PC. So today having a working model to work with, I decided to install Thunderbird on to my Librem 5. Since Thunderbird is exactly the same on both platforms, it was just a matter of copying information from one instance of the software in to another, but on a very small screen. You have to set the screen at 100% and everything gets very small. I have the two Cox accounts and was able to get them both working with Oauth2 on Thunderbird on the Librem 5. Then I set the screen back to 200%. After going back to 200%, Thunderbird is usable on the Librem 5 to comfortably read and compose emails.
I was also able to get my Protonmail email working on the Falcon web browser well enough to comfortably read and respond to emails. I was able to set Protonmail login page as the start page and somehow, it automatically logs me in. So for all three different email accounts, one of which is Protonmail, all I have to do is to click on the icon and wait for the email interface to come up.
I did some looking in to Oauth2. Yahoo has an API for their email/Oauth2. The protocol appears to be relatively simple and available to work with opensource. One guy posted roughly ten lines of his self-written authentication code and said “this is all it took for me”. You have a set of keys generated for you using available software. The public key goes to yahoo and you put the other key in to your own application code. You can also put your own server on your own phone to issue the public key back to the application if you want to. Anyone can own their own authentication server of any size and any app that accesses your privare data can be authenticated. Yahoo is encouraging companies to do this for their own computers and so that their own IT people can manage their own authentication internally to their own company. Maybe Purism could set up their own Oauth2 server to work with secure applications from Librem 1 to yahoo mail, or any other application, to promote their own products.