As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been experimenting with replacing davmail with Simon Robinson’s super-cool email-oauth2-proxy, and hooking fetchmail and mutt up to it. As before, here’s a specific rundown of how I configured O365 access using this.

Configuration

We need some small tweaks to the shipped configuration file. It’s used for both permanent configuration and acquired tokens, but the static part looks something like this:

[[email protected]]
permission_url = https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authorize
token_url = https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/token
oauth2_scope = https://outlook.office365.com/IMAP.AccessAsUser.All https://outlook.office365.com/POP.AccessAsUser.All https://outlook.office365.com/SMTP.Send offline_access
redirect_uri = https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient
client_id = facd6cff-a294-4415-b59f-c5b01937d7bd
client_secret =

We’re re-using davmail’s client_id again.

Updated 2023-10-10: emailproxy now supports a proper headless mode, as discussed below.

Updated 2022-11-22: you also want to set delete_account_token_on_password_error to False: otherwise, a typo will delete the tokens, and you’ll need to re-authenticate from scratch.

We’ll configure fetchmail as follows:

poll localhost protocol IMAP port 1993
 auth password username "[email protected]"
 is localuser here
 keep
 sslmode none
 mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T"
 folders INBOX

and mutt like this:

set smtp_url = "smtp://[email protected]@localhost:1587/"
unset smtp_pass
set ssl_starttls=no
set ssl_force_tls=no

When you first connect, you will get a GUI pop-up and you need to interact with the tray menu to follow the authorization flow. After that, the proxy will refresh tokens as necessary.

Running in systemd

Here’s my service file I use, slightly modified from the upstream’s README:

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/emailproxy.service
[Unit]
Description=Email OAuth 2.0 Proxy

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/localuser/src/email-oauth2-proxy/emailproxy.py --external-auth --no-gui --config-file /home/localuser/src/email-oauth2-proxy/my.config
Restart=always
User=joebloggs
Group=joebloggs

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Headless operation

Typically, only initial authorizations require the GUI, so you could easily do the initial dance then use the above systemd service.

Even better, with current versions of email-oauth2-proxy, you can operate in an entirely headless manner! With the above --external-auth and --no-gui options, the proxy will prompt on stdin with a URL you can copy into your browser; pasting the response URL back in will authorize the proxy, and store the necessary access and refresh tokens in the config file you specify.

For example:

$ sudo systemctl stop emailproxy

$ python3 ./emailproxy.py --external-auth --no-gui --config-file /home/localuser/src/email-oauth2-proxy/my.config

# Now connect from mutt or fetchmail.

Authorisation request received for [email protected] (external auth mode)
Email OAuth 2.0 Proxy No-GUI external auth mode: please authorise a request for account [email protected]
Please visit the following URL to authenticate account [email protected]: https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authorize?client_id=...

Copy+paste or press [↵ Return] to visit the following URL and authenticate account [email protected]: https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authorize?client_id=...
then paste here the full post-authentication URL from the browser's address bar (it should start with https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient):

# Paste the updated URL bar contents from your browser in response:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient?code=...

SMTP (localhost:1587; [email protected]) [ Successfully authenticated SMTP connection - releasing session ]
^C
$ sudo systemctl start emailproxy

Obviously, you’ll need to do this interactively from the terminal, then restart in daemon mode.

email-oauth2-proxy

If you find the above details useful, consider donating to support Simon’s sterling work on oauth2-email-proxy.