On Wed, 8 Oct 2025, Thomas Gramstad via Alpine-info wrote:
At work a lot of people seem to be moving away from E-mail to sending messages in Teams. I receive notes by e-mail that a new Teams message has been sent to me, but it seems that I must login into Teams in order to actually read the message. But still the Teams message seems to be some kind of Microsoft 365 mail message.
Here is the key question you need an answer to: Can these messages be read through the web interface of Outlook? (please notice I said "web interface of Outlook", I did not say "web interface of Teams"). As of this time the answer does not matter from the perspective of Alpine, but it does matter from the perspective of how the message is treated internally by Microsoft.
Even though one could make the argument that a message in Teams is equivalent to an email message. I think of messages in Teams as "chat", not as emails (which could be handled by replying to group/person or saved or forwarded, printed, etc.). To me it seems that Teams messages are not as rich as emails, so I doubt that a Teams message can be handled in the web interface in Outlook, but I would love to be proved wrong, because as you have clearly identified it, that is a useful thing.
The other difficulty that you will have is an unexpected difficulty. It turns out that apps need permissions to access resources. That is the beauty and drama of XOAUTH2. The Microsoft apps have permission to access Microsoft resources, and this is seamless to you, but other apps have to be given permission by the user and by the administrator of the server. The last point is where you will find trouble. Will your administrator allow an app that they do not know, that was not written with the purpose to access Teams, access a portion of Teams? This is where fears of security enters the game. Most administrators will deny you that because they do not know the app you are using and Microsoft keeps telling them not to allow other apps if they have access to the resource through the Microsoft app, which is secure and respects the privacy of their users. Now you see where I am going? You are stuck to using the Microsoft app to do this.
This is an uphill battle. Unless there is a protocol published by Microsoft to allow access (and in general handling) of messages in Teams through the web interface of Outlook, there is no hope of doing that.
Why is there any hope if the access is through the web interface of Outlook? Because that is a protocol that Alpine could be programmed to access. It is much easier to convince an administrator that you want to use an email program to read email than to convince an administrator to use an email program to read Teams. That in theory could be done, but we are not there yet.
I hope this helps. -- Eduardo _______________________________________________ Alpine-info mailing list [email protected] http://mailman23.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/alpine-info
