Re: reaching gmail in basic html?

[sorry, a little OT for the Lynx list as it wanders off into
mail-programs rather than using the Gmail web interface via lynx]

On 2019-11-05 10:16, Mouse wrote:
> > gmail supports POP3 and IMAP access,  
> 
> My experience is that gmail supports POP and IMAP only if you are
> using one of a few blessed clients, all of which are huge crawling
> GUI horrors.

Both POP3 & IMAP are standards and I've had success accessing Gmail
from multiple utilities including alpine, mutt, and
offlineimap/mbsync, along with sending via msmtp.  Granted, most of
those aren't DOS tools.

The two elements I've found that are usually required though if
you're hitting a wall with them:

1) last I checked, Google only does SSL/TLS connections, so if your
mail program tries to access POP3/IMAP/SMTP over an unencrypted
connection, it will balk.  Fortunately, all the tools I mentioned
above support TLS (or upgrading an unencrypted connection to an
encrypted one with STARTTLS).  However, there are still some out
there (especially older code-bases that haven't been updated) that
assume that plain-text is fine for sending credentials & email over
the wire.  Please either upgrade your mail program, or use something
like offlineimap/mbsync (for IMAP) or fetchmail (for POP) that does
the TLS for you and syncs it to a local mbox/Maildir/MH folder which
your mail program should then be able to access locally without
concern for the encryption.

2) for Gmail, you need login access, either with an OAUTH-enabled
program, or by going into your Gmail settings and setting up an
"application specific password".  Far fewer tools support OAUTH for
login, so you'll likely have better success if you set up the
application password, at which point most mail programs just work as
expected when given the credentials & server info.

-Tim





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