Added in Online Accounts: But still prompt for password

[marbetschar]

What Happened

When Mail is packaged using Flatpak, it is not capable of retrieving the before configured secrets from Online Accounts. This leads to a password prompt when Mail is freshly started after adding a new account in System Settings -or as @danrabbit puts it in his comment:

I'm still having trouble with the saved password in the flatpak, but this does seem to work for native mail. I wonder if there's a dbus interface we're missing that we need to add to the Mail sandbox

Expected Behavior

Once the account is added in Online Accounts, it should be fully usable from Mail - without forcing the user to retype his password again.

Steps to Reproduce

In the latest elementary OS Beta:

1. Add a new Mail account through System Settings > Online Accounts
2. Open Mail
3. A password prompt appears

Potential solution

as @Marukesu points out, we are probably dealing with a secrets management issue in Flatpak-Land:

eds use libsecret to read/save passwords, because we are on a sandbox, libsecret try to get them from a file on the sandbox instead of the DBus Interface.

Regarding this article, we might want fall back to the legacy behaviour by allowing access to the Systems Secrets Service API via DBus (org.freedesktop.secrets). But I'm wondering, if there is a more elegant solution to this matter, since this solution puts a hole in the Flatpak sandbox.

[danirabbit]

It doesn't appear that adding org.freedesktop.secrets to the sandbox exceptions resolves the issue

[Marukesu]

Because libsecret will use the keyfile backend instead of dbus, ever if we add the dbus hole.

I don't know if we can override that without downgrading the libsecret in the sandbox. so I think we need to query the credentials with online accounts and add a dbus method on it to get them.

[danirabbit]

For now, I've switched Mail back to being a Deb package on the ISO. It would be great to be able to ship in Flatpak, but in the interest of time and prioritizing working on mail features it seems like we'll have to revisit this