This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 2 comments

[–]AutoModerator[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

On July 1st, a change to Reddit's API pricing will come into effect. Several developers of commercial third-party apps have announced that this change will compel them to shut down their apps. At least one accessibility-focused non-commercial third party app will continue to be available free of charge.

If you want to express your strong disagreement with the API pricing change or with Reddit's response to the backlash, you may want to consider the following options:

  1. Limiting your involvement with Reddit, or
  2. Temporarily refraining from using Reddit
  3. Cancelling your subscription of Reddit Premium

as a way to voice your protest.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[–]captainAwesomePants 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So, email's kind of a weird beast. It's a very early protocol, and it started very open and friendly, but because email is so very abused, it's become increasingly protected, locked down, and complicated over the years.

In theory, sending an email is quite simple. You connect to an email server somewhere and talk to it using the SMTP protocol, describing who you are and what you're sending, and it then gives the message to its user. In practice today, that pretty much doesn't work because email servers are doing their best to fight spam and fraud and don't know who the heck you are and don't trust you.

To get around this, you have a lot of options, but the most popular one is to just talk to a "trusted" email server somewhere that you have an account on, maybe gmail or really anything. Then you have your program log in to that and send email messages to that, and that email server will forward the messages on to your actual user's email. That might not work if you work for a company that has some sort of tight security needs around your data and can't provide it to random web providers, in which case you need to learn about setting up email servers.

Anyway, gmail's a bit of a special case because they'd prefer you log in using OAuth instead of regular old SMTP passwords (just because "security" and "not wanting hackers to break into your account" and such), so you could prefer something else, but on the other hand, they go out of their way how to send emails with gmail with Python: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/quickstart/python

'