Re: gmail+imap+smtp (oauth2)

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> writes:

> [[S/MIME Signed Part:Undecided]]
>>>> "ESF" == Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> On Monday,  2 May 2022 at 08:45, Uwe Brauer wrote:
>>> There have been some discussion, either on emacs-devel or here, how to
>>> make emacs (gnus) work with gmail under those circumstances, that is
>>> using oauth2.
>
>> Uwe,
>
>> I had the same problem with our institution which uses Exchange and
>> moved to multi-factor authentication, i.e. oauth2.  I solved this
>> problem by using davmail [1].  I don't know if this will work for gmail
>> as well but you may wish to try.
>
> Thanks, when we started with gmail, I tried out dovecot, and there was
> a problem, that it started to download every message over and over
> when I tried to download new email,

I'm using isync (mbsync) to have a bidi-synchronization between several
imap mail accounts (fastmail, gmail, work) and local maildir stores.
That's the gmail specific part of my ~/.mbsyncrc:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
IMAPAccount gmail
Host imap.gmail.com
User USER@gmail.com
# I have my credentials in ~/.authinfo.gpg in the form:
#   machine imap.gmail.com login USER@gmail.com password APP_PWD force yes
# where APP_PWD is an application specific password one can generate
# somewhere in the Gmail/Google account settings.
PassCmd +"gpg --decrypt --no-tty --for-your-eyes-only ~/.authinfo.gpg 2> /dev/null | grep imap.gmail.com | sed 's/.*password \\([^ ]\\+\\).*/\\1/'"
SSLType IMAPS

IMAPStore gmail-remote
Account gmail

MaildirStore gmail-local
Path ~/.mail/Gmail/
Inbox ~/.mail/Gmail/INBOX
SubFolders Verbatim

Channel Gmail
Far :gmail-remote:
Near :gmail-local:
Create Near
Remove Near
Expunge Both
CopyArrivalDate yes
Patterns *
Sync All
SyncState *
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I'm not sure if this application specific password thingy I'm using will
work in the future, though.  But luckily I've moved away from Gmail in
the past years.

> besides it fill up my hard disk with additional 13 GB and that I would
> like to avoid. But maybe this will be the only way.

Both dovecot and isync usually do full synchronizations so you have
everything locally.  I consider that a good thing because then you can
index it for quick local searches.  But you can configure mbsync to sync
only specific folders.  For example, I think many people exclude Gmail's
"All Mails" folder.

Bye,
Tassilo