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Similar to updates by Microsoft for Office 365 email discussed previously, Google also has announced they will discontinue support for username/password authentication on May 30, 2022. If you use Google-hosted email, this may cause your email integration with your Request Tracker (RT) instance to stop working. Keep reading for some options to update your email integration.
As described previously, you can integrate email with RT by pushing (forwarding) email to the RT server or by pulling (fetching from a mailbox on the mail server). As noted in the linked post, if you were pulling email and are impacted by Google’s changes, one option is to convert to forward email from Google to your RT server. This approach has various pros and cons as described in the earlier post, and it would involve quite a few configuration changes.
If you are currently using the pull method with a utility like fetchmail or getmail, it’s easier to try to update your system and try to stay with the same approach. To do so, you’ll need to update your system to start using Google’s recommended OAuth2 authentication. This is currently possible with newer versions of getmail.
Version 5.6 or later of getmail come with a script called getmail-gmail-xoauth-tokens which you can use to set up the needed Oauth2 tokens to continue to retrieve email. This version is available via packages on most newer Linux systems we have worked with recently. We have used this successfully with RT integrations so far and have posted our Gmail configuration notes in our public wiki . Currently this getmail configuration seems to be a workable solution to continue to pull email, however, Google continues to make changes, so it's possible additional updates will be needed through 2022.
Support for OAuth2 in fetchmail appears to be included in version 7, which is in development but not yet released. Documentation is available in their public repository. As a development branch, this isn't a solution for a production RT system for most, but shows support may be available in future versions.
Our App-wsgetmail utility mentioned previously continues to be available, but currently supports only Office 365. Since there is a functioning getmail option that works with Google email, we currently are not planning to add support for Google mail to the utility. However, in the future someone may prefer a solution that retrieves email via APIs rather than IMAP, so we may consider adding support at some point.
The notes linked above are on our public RT wiki and we welcome improvements to make the somewhat challenging set-up process easier to follow. If you need professional assistance with RT and your email configuration, you can also contact us at sales@bestpractical.com.