Perhaps I didn't make it very clear in the original announcement, so here are some recaps:
- It's an
annual review (ie. $720+ every year)
- Based on my experience from last year, the review process alone takes a lot of my time
- It's a significant amount of stress (but considering the last several months, that's a wash)
- Most importantly, I don't think it will continue to be $720/year and it will be at least $2700/year (the $720/year is a promotion and $2700 is the regular price, which is still cheaper compared to other businesses offering the same service)
I spent considerable time last week, probably about eight hours total
Sorry about that, but I have no idea why it took that long. Hopefully the initial setup did only take the 10 minutes I estimated, and so the other time is presumably having to re-authenticate the accounts with the new Oauth2 setup. If the instructions were unclear, I'm obviously willing to update it (if it's still necessary).
Having to reestablish 43 Oauth2 credentials every seven days is a cruel joke
That's still to be determined. I will say that in my experience, it only takes a few mindless clicks to re-authenticate, which is just a matter of allowing my webbrowser to save cookies and passwords. But I can appreciate that having to do that for 43 accounts -- especially at the same time -- would be exasperating.
It's usually best not to give out technical advice if you're not sure how it works.
I do truly apologize for that, but allowing this "kludge" was obviously not the original solution. It was added last minute because I found that people were not liking the need to enable 2FA (which I still believe is an unnecessary restriction to using app-passwords) and so I looked for another alternative.
I hate to criticize a free product that I have used for many years
And therein lies a major problem. Google has now made it wholly impractical to provide not just a free email client, but even a OTP email client.
I haven't completely given up on the idea of paying Google's fees. The good news is that the standard Oauth2 *does* continue to work, and I'll be pre-releasing v5.6.3 soon to make it easier (ie. not disabling Oauth2). In hindsight, I wish I had taken this approach in the first place, but I fully expected it to be shutdown. My dev account no longer shows a date like it did before, it says it's verified, and that's all I can tell you.
So give me your thoughts. For the sake of discussion, would changing POP Peeper to a subscription-only service have been any less offensive to you than doing what I did and trying to keep it free?
And, while I can accept constructive criticism, I've been under more stress than you can imagine because of this, so please keep that in mind.
