Shallow Thoughts : : email

Gmail with an App Password

In 2022 I wrote about Sending Mail via Gmail using OAuth2.

But it turned out that Google expires OAuth2 tokens on a weekly basis. So if you use that method, once a week you'll have to bring up a browser, log in to your Google account and go through the five or so pages of re-authorizing. Which will invariably happen when you're in a hurry and just wanted to send a quick email so you can move on to other things.

However, it turns out there's an easier way, which apparently doesn't expire: App passwords. I switched to using app passwords back then (I've been using that app password since then), and I even wrote it up, and then forgot to post it. What a dingbat!

But I changed my GMail password recently, and it turns out when you change your Gmail account password, Google revokes all app passwords you've set up (and, of course, doesn't bother to tell you that, and the error message you get when you try to sign in with the old app password has nothing whatever to do with the actual problem, which is that your app password has been revoked and you need to create a new one).

So I dug out this old never-got-posted article and used it to make a new app password, and have updated the parts that were a little out of date.

Read more ...

Tags: email, mutt, gmail
[ 20:32 Mar 29, 2024    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

View Mail Attachments from Mutt

Back in 2015, I wrote a script for the mutt mailer (or any plaintext mail program, really) to view MS Word documents (or other unfriendly formats) attached to emails. (This is unfortunately something that comes up constantly in email exchanges with League of Women Voters people —

Read more ...

Tags: email, mutt, programming, python, linux
[ 18:52 Dec 18, 2022    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Sending Mail via Gmail using OAuth2 (2022 Edition)

Update: Google's OAuth2 turns out to be not a good way to send mail, because passwords have to be renewed weekly. So you probably want to use a GMail App Password instead. I'm leaving this article up in case there's some reason someone would actually want to use OAuth2 with GMail.

There's been lots of talk on mailing lists for various mail programs, like Alpine and Mutt, about Google's impending dropping of password access.

Although my regular email address is on a Linux server, I subscribe to several Google Groups. I use a gmail address for those, because Google Groups doesn't work well with non-gmail addresses (you can't view the archives or temporarily turn off mail, and unsubscribing may or may not work depending on the phase of the moon).

I prefer not to have to sign on to Google and use the clunky browser interface when I have a perfectly good mailer (I use mutt) on my computer. I send mail from mutt using a program called msmtp. But to post to a Google Group, I need to use Google's SMTP server. (SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the way mail gets from one computer to another across the internet.)

Up to now, I've been using an msmtp configuration that includes my Gmail password. That requires clicking through several Gmail pages to enable the "Less Secure Apps" setting. Google resets that preference every month or so and I have to go find the "Less Secure Apps" page to click through the screens again; but aside from that, it works okay.

But now Google has announced they'll be removing support for password access on May 30, 2022.

Read more ...

Tags: email, mutt, gmail, oauth
[ 00:00 May 20, 2022    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Email is not private

Microsoft is in trouble this week -- someone discovered Microsoft read a user's Hotmail email as part of an internal leak investigation (more info here: Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told). And that led The Verge to publish the alarming news that it's not just Microsoft -- any company that handles your mail can also look at the contents: "Free email also means someone else is hosting it; they own the servers, and there's no legal or technical safeguard to keep them from looking at what's inside."

Well, yeah. That's true of any email system -- not just free webmail like Hotmail or Gmail. I was lucky enough to learn that lesson early.

I was a high school student in the midst of college application angst. The physics department at the local university had generously given me an account on their Unix PDP-11 since I'd taken a few physics classes there.

I had just sent off some sort of long, angst-y email message to a friend at another local college, laying my soul bare, worrying about my college applications and life choices and who I was going to be for the rest of my life. You know, all that important earth-shattering stuff you worry about when you're that age, when you're sure that any wrong choice will ruin the whole rest of your life forever.

And then, fiddling around on the Unix system after sending my angsty mail, I had some sort of technical question, something I couldn't figure out from the man pages, and I sent off a quick question to the same college friend.

A couple of minutes later, I had new mail. From root. (For non-Unix users, root is the account of the system administrator: the person in charge of running the computer.) The mail read:

Just ask root. He knows all!

followed by a clear, concise answer to my technical question.

Great! ... except I hadn't asked root. I had asked my friend at a college across town.

When I got the email from root, it shook me up. His response to the short technical question was just what I needed ... but if he'd read my question, did it mean he'd also read the long soul-baring message I'd sent just minutes earlier? Was he the sort of snoop who spent his time reading all the mail passing through the system? I wouldn't have thought so, but ...

I didn't ask; I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Lesson learned. Email isn't private. Root (or maybe anyone else with enough knowledge) can read your email.

Maybe five years later, I was a systems administrator on a Sun network, and I found out what must have happened. Turns out, when you're a sysadmin, sometimes you see things like that without intending to. Something goes wrong with the email system, and you're trying to fix it, and there's a spool directory full of files with randomized names, and you're checking on which ones are old and which are recent, and what has and hasn't gotten sent ... and some of those files have content that includes the bodies of email messages. And sometimes you see part of what's in them. You're not trying to snoop. You don't sit there and read the full content of what your users are emailing. (For one thing, you don't have time, since typically this happens when you're madly trying to fix a critical email problem.) But sometimes you do see snippets, even if you're not trying to. I suspect that's probably what happened when "root" replied to my message.

And, of course, a snoopy and unethical system administrator who really wanted to invade his users' privacy could easily read everything passing through the system. I doubt that happened on the college system where I had an account, and I certainly didn't do it when I was a sysadmin. But it could happen.

The lesson is that email, if you don't encrypt it, isn't private. Think of email as being like a postcard. You don't expect Post Office employees to read what's written on the postcard -- generally they have better things to do -- but there are dozens of people who handle your postcard as it gets delivered who could read it if they wanted to.

As the Verge article says, "Peeking into your clients' inbox is bad form, but it's perfectly legal."

Of course, none of this excuses Microsoft's deliberately reading Hotmail mailboxes. It is bad form, and amid the outcry Microsoft has changed its Hotmail snooping policies somewhat, saying they'll only snoop deliberately in certain cases).

But the lesson for users is: if you're writing anything private, anything you don't want other people to read ... don't put it on a postcard. Or in unencrypted email.

Tags: email, privacy, tech
[ 14:59 Mar 27, 2014    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Viewing HTML mail messages from Mutt (or other command-line mailers)

Update: the script described in this article has been folded into another script called viewmailattachments.py.

Command-line mailers like mutt have one disadvantage: viewing HTML mail with embedded images. Without images, HTML mail is no problem -- run it through lynx, links or w3m. But if you want to see images in place, how do you do it?

Mutt can send a message to a browser like firefox ... but only the textual part of the message. The images don't show up.

That's because mail messages include images, not as separate files, but as attachments within the same file, encoded it a format known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). An image link in the HTML, instead of looking like <img src="picture.jpg">., will instead look something like <img src="cid:0635428E-AE25-4FA0-93AC-6B8379300161">. (Apple's Mail.app) or <img src="cid:1.3631871432@web82503.mail.mud.yahoo.com">. (Yahoo's webmail).

CID stands for Content ID, and refers to the ID of the image as it is encoded in MIME inside the image. GUI mail programs, of course, know how to decode this and show the image. Mutt doesn't.

A web search finds a handful of shell scripts that use the munpack program (part of the mpack package on Debian systems) to split off the files; then they use various combinations of sed and awk to try to view those files. Except that none of the scripts I found actually work for messages sent from modern mailers -- they don't decode the CID links properly.

I wasted several hours fiddling with various shell scripts, trying to adjust sed and awk commands to figure out the problem, when I had the usual epiphany that always eventually arises from shell script fiddling: "Wouldn't this be a lot easier in Python?"

Python's email package

Python has a package called email that knows how to list and unpack MIME attachments. Starting from the example near the bottom of that page, it was easy to split off the various attachments and save them in a temp directory. The key is

import email

fp = open(msgfile)
msg = email.message_from_file(fp)
fp.close()

for part in msg.walk():

That left the problem of how to match CIDs with filenames, and rewrite the links in the HTML message accordingly.

The documentation on the email package is a bit unclear, unfortunately. For instance, they don't give any hints what object you'll get when iterating over a message with walk, and if you try it, they're just type 'instance'. So what operations can you expect are legal on them? If you run help(part) in the Python console on one of the parts you get from walk, it's generally class Message, so you can use the Message API, with functions like get_content_type(), get_filename(). and get_payload().

More useful, it has dictionary keys() for the attributes it knows about each attachment. part.keys() gets you a list like

['Content-Type', 
 'Content-Transfer-Encoding',
 'Content-ID',
 'Content-Disposition' ]

So by making a list relating part.get_filename() (with a made-up filename if it doesn't have one already) to part['Content-ID'], I'd have enough information to rewrite those links.

Case-insensitive dictionary matching

But wait! Not so simple. That list is from a Yahoo mail message, but if you try keys() on a part sent by Apple mail, instead if will be 'Content-Id'. Note the lower-case d, Id, instead of the ID that Yahoo used.

Unfortunately, Python doesn't have a way of looking up items in a dictionary with the key being case-sensitive. So I used a loop:

    for k in part.keys():
        if k.lower() == 'content-id':
            print "Content ID is", part[k]

Most mailers seem to put angle brackets around the content id, so that would print things like "Content ID is <14.3631871432@web82503.mail.mud.yahoo.com>". Those angle brackets have to be removed, since the CID links in the HTML file don't have them.

for k in part.keys():
    if k.lower() == 'content-id':
        if part[k].startswith('<') and part[k].endswith('>'):
            part[k] = part[k][1:-1]

But that didn't work -- the angle brackets were still there, even though if I printed part[k][1:-1] it printed without angle brackets. What was up?

Unmutable parts inside email.Message

It turned out that the parts inside an email Message (and maybe the Message itself) are unmutable -- you can't change them. Python doesn't throw an exception; it just doesn't change anything. So I had to make a local copy:

for k in part.keys():
    if k.lower() == 'content-id':
        content_id = part[k]
        if content_id.startswith('<') and content_id.endswith('>'):
            content_id = content_id[1:-1]

and then save content_id, not part[k], in my list of filenames and CIDs.

Then the rest is easy. Assuming I've built up a list called subfiles containing dictionaries with 'filename' and 'Content-Id', I can do the substitution in the HTML source:

    htmlsrc = html_part.get_payload(decode=True)
    for sf in subfiles:
        htmlsrc = re.sub('cid: ?' + sf['Content-Id'],
                         'file://' + sf['filename'],
                         htmlsrc, flags=re.IGNORECASE)

Then all I have to do is hook it up to a key in my .muttrc:

# macro  index  <F10>  "<copy-message>/tmp/mutttmpbox\n<enter><shell-escape>~/bin/viewhtmlmail.py\n" "View HTML in browser"
# macro  pager  <F10>  "<copy-message>/tmp/mutttmpbox\n<enter><shell-escape>~/bin/viewhtmlmail.py\n" "View HTML in browser"

Works nicely! Here's the complete script: viewhtmlmail.

Tags: email, mutt, programming, python, mime, cmdline
[ 11:49 Oct 07, 2013    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Mutt: Show HTML for sites that send broken HTML mail

Increasingly I'm seeing broken sites that send automated HTML mail with headers claiming it's plain text.

To understand what's happening, you have to know about something called MIME multipart/alternative.

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions: it's the way mail encodes different types of attachments, so you can attach images, music, PDF documents or whatever with your email.

If you send a normal plain text mail message, you don't need MIME. But as soon as you send anything else -- like an HTML message where you've made a word bold, changed color or inserted images -- you need it. MIME adds a Content-Type to the message saying "This is HTML mail, so you need to display it as HTML when you receive it" or "Here's a PDF attachment, so you need to display it in a PDF viewer". The headers for these two cases would look like this:

Content-Type: text/html
Content-Type: application/pdf

A lot of mail programs, for reasons that have never been particularly clear, like to send two copies of every mail message: one in plain text, one in HTML. They're two copies of the same message -- it's just that one version has fancier formatting than the other. The MIME header that announces this is

Content-Type: multipart/alternative

because the two versions, text and HTML, are alternative versions of the same message. The recipient need only read one, not both. Inside the multipart/alternative section there will be further MIME headers, one saying Content-Type: text/plain, where it puts the text of your message, and one Content-Type: text/html, where it puts HTML source code.

This mostly works fine for real mail programs (though it's a rather silly waste of bandwidth, sending double copies of everything for no particularly good reason, and personally I always configure the mailers I use to send only one copy at a time). But increasingly I'm seeing automated mail robots that send multipart/alternative mail, but do it wrong: they send HTML for both parts, or they send a valid HTML part and a blank text part.

Why don't the site owners notice the problem?

You wouldn't ever notice a problem if you use the default configuration on most mailers, to show the HTML part if at all possible. But most mail programs give you an option to show the text part if there is one. That way, you don't have to worry about those people who like to send messages in pink blinking text on a plaid background -- all you see is the text.

If your mailer is configured to show plain text, for most messages you'll see just text -- no colors, no blinking, no annoyances. But for mail sent by these misconfigured mail robots, what you'll see is HTML source code.

I've seen this in several places -- lots of spammers do it (who cares? I was going to delete the message anyway), and one of the local astronomy clubs does it so I've long since stopped trying to read their announcements. But the latest place I've seen this is one that ought to know better: Coursera. They apparently reconfigured their notification system recently, and I started getting course notifications that look like this:

/* Client-specific Styles */
#outlook a{padding:0;} /* Force Outlook to provide a "view in browser" button.
*/
body{width:100% !important;} .ReadMsgBody{width:100%;}
.ExternalClass{width:100%;} /* Force Hotmail to display emails at full width */
body{-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;} /* Prevent Webkit platforms from changing
default text sizes. */
/* Reset Styles */
body{margin:0; padding:0;}
img{border:0; height:auto; line-height:100%; outline:none;
text-decoration:none;}
table td{border-collapse:collapse;}
#backgroundTable{height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%
!important;}
p {margin-top: 14px; margin-bottom: 14px;}
/* /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ STANDARD STYLING: PREHEADER /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ */
.preheaderContent div a:link, .preheaderContent div a:visited, /* Yahoo! Mail
Override */ .preheaderContent div a .yshortcuts /* Yahoo! Mail Override */{
  color: #3b6e8f;

... and on and on like that. You get the idea. It's unreadable, even by a geek who knows HTML pretty well. It would be fine in the HTML part of the message -- but this is what they're sending in the text/plain part.

I filed a bug, but Coursera doesn't have a lot of staff to respond to bug reports and it might be quite some time before they fix this. Meanwhile, I don't want to miss notifications for the algorithms course I'm currently taking. So I needed a workaround.

How to work around the problem in mutt

I found one for mutt at alternative_order and folder-hook. When in my "classes" folder, I use a folder hook to tell mutt to prefer text/html format over text/plain, even though my default is text/plain. Then you also need to add a default folder hook to set the default back for every other folder -- mutt folder hooks are frustrating in that way.

The two folder hooks look like this:

folder-hook . 'set unalternative_order *; alternative_order text/plain text'

# Prefer the HTML part but only for Coursera,
# since it sends HTML in the text part.
folder-hook =in/coursera 'unalternative_order *; alternative_order text/html'

alternative_order specifies which types you'd most like to read. unalternative_order is a lot less clear; the documentation says it "removes a mime type from the alternative_order list", but doesn't say anything more than that. What's the syntax? What's the difference between using unalternative_order or just re-setting alternative_order? Why do I have to specify it with * in both places? No one seems to know.

So it's a little unsatisfying, and perhaps not the cleanest way. But it does work around the bug for sites where you really need a way to read the mail.

Update: I also found this discussion of alternative_order which gives a nice set of key bindings to toggle interactively between the various formats. It was missing some backslashes, so I had to fiddle with it slightly to get it to work. Put this in .muttrc:

macro pager ,@aoh= "\
<enter-command> unalternative_order *; \
alternative_order text/enriched text/html text/plain text;\
macro pager A ,@aot= 'toggle alternative order'<enter>\
<exit><display-message>"

macro pager ,@aot= "\
<enter-command> unalternative_order *; \
alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text/html text;\
macro pager A ,@aoh= 'toggle alternative order'<enter>\
<exit><display-message>"

macro pager A ,@aot= "toggle alternative order"

Then just type A (capital A) to toggle between formats. If it doesn't change the first time you type A, type another one and it should redisplay. I've found it quite handy.

Tags: mutt, email, html
[ 15:13 Jul 29, 2013    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

Automated mail: check the plaintext part (or don't send one)

Funny thing happened last week.

I'm on the mailing list for a volunteer group. Round about last December, I started getting emails every few weeks congratulating me on RSVPing for the annual picnic meeting on October 17.

This being well past October, when the meeting apparently occurred -- and considering I'd never heard of the meeting before, let alone RSVPed for it -- I couldn't figure out why I kept getting these notices.

After about the third time I got the same notice, I tried replying, telling them there must be something wrong with their mailer. I never got a reply, and a few weeks later I got another copy of the message about the October meeting.

I continued sending replies, getting nothing in return -- until last week, when I got a nice apologetic note from someone in the organization, and an explanation of what had happened. And the explanation made me laugh.

Seems their automated email system sends messages as multipart, both HTML and plaintext. Many user mailers do that; if you haven't explicitly set it to do otherwise, you yourself are probably sending out two copies of every mail you send, one in HTML and one in plain text.

But in this automated system, the plaintext part was broken. When it sent out new messages in HTML format, apparently for the plaintext part it was always attaching the same old message, this message from October. Apparently no one in the organization had ever bothered to check the configuration, or looked at the plaintext part, to realize it was broken. They probably didn't even know it was sending out multiple formats.

I have my mailer configured to show me plaintext in preference to HTML. Even if I didn't use a text mailer (mutt), I'd still use that setting -- Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Claws and many other mailers offer it. It protects you from lots of scams and phishing attacks, "web bugs" to track you,, and people who think it's the height of style to send mail in blinking yellow comic sans on a red plaid background.

And reading the plaintext messages from this organization, I'd never noticed that the message had an HTML part, or thought to look at it to see if it was different.

It's not the first time I've seen automated mailers send multipart mail with the text part broken. An astronomy club I used to belong to set up a new website last year, and now all their meeting notices, which used to come in plaintext over a Yahoo groups mailing list, have a text part that looks like this actual example from a few days ago:

Subject: Members' Night at the Monthly Meeting
<p>&#60;&#115;&#116;&#121;&#108;&#101;&#32;&#116;&#121;&#112;&#101;&#61;&#34;&#1
16;&#101;&#120;&#116;&#47;&#99;&#115;&#115;&#34;&#62;@font-face {
  font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
  font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
  font-family: "Cambria";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size:
12pt; font-family: Cambria; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue;
text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color:
purple; text-decoration: underline; }.MsoChpDefault { font-family: Cambria;
}div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1;
}&#60;&#47;&#115;&#116;&#121;&#108;&#101;&#62;
<p class="MsoNormal">Friday April 8<sup>th</sup> is members’ night at the
monthly meeting of the PAS.<span style="">&#160; </span>We are asking for
anyone, who has astronomical photographs that they would like to share, to
present them at the meeting.<span style="">&#160; </span>Each presenter will
have about 15 minutes to present and discuss his pictures.<span style=""> We
already have some presenters. &#160; </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">&#160;</p>

... on and on for pages full of HTML tags and no line breaks. I contacted the webmaster, but he was just using packaged software and didn't seem to grok that the software was broken and was sending HTML for the plaintext part as well as for the HTML part. His response was fairly typical: "It looks fine to me". I eventually gave up even trying to read their meeting announcements, and now I just delete them.

The silly thing about this is that I can read HTML mail just fine, if they'd just send HTML mail. What causes the problem is these automated systems that insist on sending both HTML and plaintext, but then the plaintext part is wrong. You'll see it on a lot of spam, too, where the plaintext portion says something like "Get a better mailer" (why? so I can see your phishing attack in all its glory?)

Folks, if you're setting up an automated email system, just pick one format and send it. Don't configure it to send multiple formats unless you're willing to test that all the formats actually work.

And developers, if you're writing an automated email system: don't use MIME multipart/alternative by default unless you're actually sending the same message in different formats. And if you must use multipart ... test it. Because your users, the administrators deploying your system for their organizations, won't know how to.

Tags: tech, email
[ 14:19 Mar 27, 2011    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]

"Joe-job" spam (forged From addresses)

I'm in a Yahoo group where a spammer just posted a message that looked like it was coming from someone in the group, so Yahoo allowed it.

The list owner posted a message about using good passwords so your account isn't hacked since that causes problems for everyone.

Of course, that's good advice and using good passwords is always a good idea. But I though this sounded more like a Joe-job spam, in which the spammer forges the From address to look like it's coming from someone else.

Normal users encounter this in two ways:

1. You start getting tons of bounce messages that look as though you sent spam to hundreds of people and they're refusing it.
2. You see spam that looks like it came from a friend of yours, or spam on a mailing list that looks like it came from a legitimate member of that list.

Since this sort of attack is so common, I felt the victim didn't deserve being harangued about not having set up a good password. So I posted a short note to the list explaining about Joe-jobs. But to make the point, I forged the From address of the list owner. Indeed, it got through Yahoo and out to the list just fine:

[ ... ] the spam probably wasn't from a bad password. It was probably just a spammer forging the header to look like it's from a legitimate user. It's called a "joe-job": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe-job

To illustrate, I've changed the From address on this message to look like it's coming from Adam. I have not hacked [listowner]'s account or guessed his password or anything else. If this works, and looks like it came from [listowner], then the spam could have been done the same way -- and there's no need to blame the owner of the account, or accuse them of having a bad password.

Why does this work? Why doesn't Yahoo just block messages from user@isp.com if the mail doesn't come from isp.com?

They can't! Many, many people don't send mail from the domains in their email addresses. In effect, people forge their From header all the time. Here are some examples:

• You're using you@gmail.com, but you're using Thunderbird or Eudora or Evolution or something to read and send mail from home.
• You're on your computer at home, but you're sending work-related email from your work account.
• You're on your laptop, using Thunderbird or whatever, mailing from you@isp.com, but you're at a friend's house or a hotel or conference or somewhere.
• You're sending mail from a public terminal somewhere (eek, do people really type their mail info in to these things?)
• You're reading and sending mail from a mobile phone.
• You're sending mail from your own domain, me@mydomain.com, but you're at home or somewhere else other than wherever mydomain.com is hosted.

If mailing lists rejected posts in all these cases, people would be pretty annoyed. So they don't. But that means that now and then, some Joe-job spam gets through to mailing lists. Unfortunately.

(Update: The message that inspired this may very well have been a hacked password after all case, based on the mail headers. But I found that a lot of people didn't know about Joe-jobbing, so I thought this was worth writing up anyway.)

Tags: security, email, joe-job, spam
[ 22:28 Apr 13, 2010    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]