Concern about using mailspring

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1

Hi, I am quite new to mailspring. In fact i only discovered it couple of days ago. I installed it and really like the look of it. But I have concern about why its asking me to grant it access in my gmail and account rather than storing the access details locally?

I tried to read the licence page, but each time I click Help → view licence, all it does it prompts me to choose a browser and it freezes there.

My questions if anyone willing to answer them:

  1. Do mailspring read, store, access or process the emails in any way?
  2. Why do you need me to grant you access to my gmail account rather than using username and password like the other email clients?

Thanks in advance.

2

username and password is less secure. Even google makes it harder to authenticate this way as you would have to generate an app password specifically for the email client that logs in this way. Most modern email clients (mailspring included) uses Oauth, which is why it opens a webpage asking to login to your gmail account. Mailspring is not actually getting access to your whole Google account, only those permissions relating to emails and I think calendar, then gmail (google) grants mailspring a token to authenticate (much safer than username and password).

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