Re: Is this a joke?
As for GMail, Google has been trying everything to nail their GMail shut. They even invented their own authentication mechanism just to break competing e-mail clients. Most new clients can deal with it again, but Google will simply keep blocking your client randomly, bombarding you with “Suspicious sign in prevented” messages.
That's a bit unfair. They did switch to oauth 2 which obviously didn't work with non-oauth2 imap clients, but they still let you "downgrade" your account to allow the usual user/password authentication.
And the oauth2 stuff is a standard, and well documented: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/xoauth2-protocol
Biting the hand that feeds IT
