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> Infrastructure to handle authentication on the web already exists. Email does not run over the web, it runs over the internet. It uses a completely different

> Infrastructure to handle authentication on the web already exists. Email does not run over the web, it runs over the internet. It uses a completely different set of protocols from the web, which were all invented at least 5 years before the first web protocol. Why should email clients be required to add HTTP support in order to make email work? Maybe we should take heed of Zawinski's Law, and make all web browsers implement native email clients instead. Yeah, that's probably it. The Netscape Communicator/Mozilla Suite model should never have been dropped, and it was a mistake to separate Firefox and Thunderbird as separate projects! /s

0x457 4y ago
Well, because it already exists? All email clients need to do: - Open a link in a browser (don't you dare open it in an embedded browser, I will find you and force you to type 100 characters as I dictate it to you) - Handle callback. That's all. That's the entire authentication. There is probably not a single platform (language and maybe a framework) that is used to build an email client and has no library to handle this with a few lines of code. I think that's a much better and easier solution than make developers of email clients handle the very possible authentication method email providers could come up with (see reply to my comment about 2FA with Google). Also, old opera with torrent client, calendar, compressing proxy, email client was the best.