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I can see lately almost all 3rd party gmail apps/clients require access to "View and manage your mail". I know that they need this to delete emails, starring, labelling etc.

My question is, are the app developers (not the app) able to access and read my emails without my knowledge (I'm assuming google will send a new email when it recognizes a new login attempt from unrecognized device)? Is it possible for them to do that as they don't have access to my password?

webchun
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The developers will be able to read your email via the app. If through no other way than to put this "feature" into their application, as you read your emails they can make their application send your emails to them.

No they wont be able to login to https://mail.google.com as you, but they wont need to.

David Waters
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  • Sounds scary. Is there anything we can do to track the app sending emails to suspicious target? I have an app called Little Snitch in my Mac that monitors outgoing network activities and tell us when it found one. Will it be enough? – webchun Oct 17 '16 at 02:47
  • Is this a local app (Mac, PC, Phone, etc) or a web app? But the short answer is no you can not, you are going to be expecting this app to access the network, once an app (or application) has access to any internet it is very hard to stop them sending data over that link. The app could login to you gmail account, read and remember a bunch of emails, login to their account and send themselves an email with the content of yours. There are lots of otherwise is one that would be hard to spot because all you see is encrypted traffic to mail.google.com which is what you expect. – David Waters Oct 17 '16 at 03:30
  • it's a mac app btw – webchun Oct 17 '16 at 04:24