[Alpine-info] Reading Teams messages in Alpine? (NN mentioned UB-felles (fwd)

[Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info]

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