I guess I am wrong. Looks like I do have to go through some sort of Google login page when I set up my email for the first time https://imgur.com/a/Vlj09
The Thunderbird team's bug tracker has some context [2] where they had to move quickly to add functionality to Thunderbird to support the SASL XOAUTH2 for IMAP so that Thunderbird would keep working with Gmail.
[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/04/new-security-measure...
Opening connection to imap.gmail.com via tls...
Opening TLS connection to `imap.gmail.com'...
Opening TLS connection with `gnutls-cli --insecure -p 993 imap.gmail.com'...done
Opening TLS connection to `imap.gmail.com'...done
nnimap (gmail) open error: 'NO (ALERT) Please log in via your web browser:
https://support.google.com/mail/accounts/answer/78754 (Failure)'. Continue? (y or n)
This used to work until a few months ago. It is also possible that something is missing on my computer. My computer was stolen recently and I haven't quite had the time to get to the bottom of this and several other similar things :/Even though a lot of my outgoing e-mail goes straight to spam, I'm glad I did. I hate this crap.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...