Re: my solution to recent gmail issues

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6260879 
suggests that less secure apps are still going away.

On Mon, 22 Jan 2024, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:

> I have recently received a message that I *SHALL* move to 2 
> Factor Authentication in Gsuite, and, as I suspected, this broke 
> my arrangement (which exists sicne years and years) and I took 
> my counter-measures, and I wish to share.
>
> In a nutshell what I wanted to achieve and what I did is:
>
> (1) I want to have mail stored locally on my machine, and to 
> have
>     incoming mails processed by procmail (this is not just for 
> my fun,
>     I have a couple of cases where procmail post-processes mail 
> from
>     forms to update a local database for service reasons).
>
> (2) The simplest way to feed incoming mails into procmail is to 
> use
>    fetchmail, which I am happily using since 2018, when my 
> institution
>    moved from howgrown sendmail to Gsuite
>
> (3) The simplest way to have fetchmail working (after I 
> activated
>     2FA on Gsuite fetchmail was not authenticateds) is to 
> "bypass" Gmail,
>     i.e. instruct Gsuite to forward all mail to another 
> provider which
>     provides *standard* IMAP.
>
>     This solves 98% of my problems, because
>
>     - Spam is not forwarded from Gmail to the alternate 
> provider
>     - messages forwrded *and deleted* are not actually deleted
>       but staged in Gmail's Bin for 30 days
>
> (4)  The solution is ... "app passwords". Gmail with 2FA allows 
> to
>     define a 16-char password THEY generate to be used with 
> what in
>     the past were called provocatorily "less secure 
> applications"
>
>     So I generated such an "app passwords" and I can use it 
> from my
>     preferred mail client (Alpine). And this solves my problem.
>
> (5)  Actually the same app password can work also with 
> fetchmail,
>     so in theory I would not need the alternate provider of 
> point (3) and
>     could work "as previously", but I left it in.
>
> I had no need to move to OAUTH2, or learn it, or get an 
> OAUTH2-capable version of fetchmail (I use the OS-bundled one).
>
> I think I could be happy with the new arrangement.
>
> I hope the above is useful to somebody else.

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison                      Kendal, UK
                    [email protected]