Fun with Gmail
June 2, 2022 8:37 AM   Subscribe

Both Mr. DrGail and I have gmail accounts that we have been accessing through Windows Live Mail 2012 on our Windows10 machines. (Mine is a desktop and he uses a laptop, in case it matters.) As of today, thanks to Google's decision not to support WLM2012 any longer, we can no longer download our emails through WLM2012 and this makes us sad.

I am willing to throw some money at this if needed, and would like to end up with a way to access and work with emails that doesn't involve our web browser and works, as much as possible, like WLM2012. So, what to do? Please ELI5 because I know how to do things on a computer, but am pretty clueless about how to do things to a computer. I gather we will need to purchase/download some sort of email client (do they still call them email clients?). We don't need any calendar interfaces or fancy collaboration, just barebones write, send, receive, and store emails.
posted by DrGail to Computers & Internet (19 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Oh, and I still have an old work-related email address that isn't based on gmail. If I could loop that in as well and access those emails along with my gmail, just as I do in WLM2012, I would be very happy.
posted by DrGail at 8:43 AM on June 2, 2022


Windows Mail? Thunderbird? I'm not sure if there was some specific feature in Windows Live Mail 2012, but generally using an email client that old isn't the most secure option anyway.
posted by sagc at 8:51 AM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


What can you tell us about how WLM accessed GMail? Hop into the settings and look for some three- or four-letter acronyms: POP, IMAP, TLS, and SSL.

tl;dr: if WLM is using POP or IMAP, using Thunderbird or Apple Mail should do you just fine.
posted by humbug at 9:08 AM on June 2, 2022


I have been happy with Thunderbird in the past. It is/was somewhat similar to Outlook in terms of being an email client that can do as much or as little as you wish. I have never deleted an email in my primary GMail account. I have close to 500,000 emails. Thunderbird still functions under the weight, but it is slow at times because it is trying to update the 20 labels/folders I use. So, I now use it for two of my other email addresses and it works well. It is great for copying emails from one account to another. I use IMAP.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:10 AM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: We use IMAP incoming, SMTP outgoing for the gmail accounts.
posted by DrGail at 9:35 AM on June 2, 2022


Microsoft support for Windows Essentials, of which Windows Live Mail was a part, ended January 10, 2017 and you should move to a currently supported email client, even if it's just the built-in Mail client in Win10
posted by glonous keming at 9:55 AM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


I grudgingly decided to use the built-in Mail app in Windows 10, just to gain some familiarity with it. (I am mostly a Mac user.) It does the usual MS bullshit of hiding way too many configuration options, but it's not terrible to set up. I'm using it (IMAP/SMTP) for my Gmail account, and it's... fine?

If I were using it for professional/work reasons, I think I'd lean toward Thunderbird, if only for its friendlier and more robust signature options and more extensive server-side configuration options. But as a home user, the built-in Windows 10 Mail app has been good enough to manage four IMAP accounts for personal use.
posted by xedrik at 10:01 AM on June 2, 2022


Here are Microsoft's instructions for setting up the Mail app in Windows 10 and here are Google's own instructions for setting up a third party client. Note that when you set up a "modern" client for gmail you'll be redirected to a browser to log in, instead of just entering a password directly. If you decide to use an app that doesn't support this kind of login you'll need to change some settings described in Google's instructions (specifically the stuff about using an app password and allowing less secure apps).
posted by fedward at 10:11 AM on June 2, 2022


Best answer: Choosing to go with Thunderbird would mean that you are one step closer to not being locked in to anybody's proprietary platform, because there are versions of Thunderbird that will work pretty much the same way on pretty much anything.
posted by flabdablet at 11:28 AM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


Best answer: By the way, initial setup for Thunderbird and an existing GMail account is very very easy. You just tell Thunderbird your name and your GMail address, and you pretty much immedately get a completely workable encrypted IMAP / encrypted SMTP connection that you can log into using the OAuth2 protocol that Google prefers for these things; no need to do anything even slightly clever on Google's end.

If you want to retain a complete local copy of your entire GMail account, you can do that after initial setup by poking around in Thunderbird's IMAP settings and telling it to retain all mail for offline use. It will then launch into a very lengthy initial downloading session, which you can interrupt at any time and pick up whenever convenient. If you don't do that, Thunderbird IMAP accounts download only the mail headers in order to populate your local mailbox views and pull in the rest of an email only as you open them.
posted by flabdablet at 11:31 AM on June 2, 2022


Best answer: Thunderbird also stores the local copy of all mails in a simple and robust text-file-based format called MBOX, which has existed since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth and is far less likely to corrupt itself in spectacular ways than any of the idiotic proprietary mailbox formats Microsoft has always seemed so keen on.
posted by flabdablet at 11:39 AM on June 2, 2022


I use Apple Mail to access my gmail so this might not work the same for you, but I just fixed this problem. 1) Log into your gmail account in a web browser, and turn on 2-factor authentication if you haven’t already. 2) Go to App Passwords in the gmail Security tab and select your preferred mail app from their list, which will generate a 16-digit password. 3) Open your mail app and replace your password with the 16-digit one. You’ll have to do this for both the smtp and imap servers. 4) Profit!
posted by farkleberry at 12:01 PM on June 2, 2022


I'm surprised no one has recommended simply using the browser Gmail client. It's really, really good, and there is NO setup. Gmail stores your email for you.

On principle, I don't like this as much, but if you're already using Gmail, you're not gaining any privacy benefit or, I'd say, any back-up/data security benefit by using your own lesser email client. So you might as well benefit from the ease of setup and use.

In short: go to mail.google.com in any browser, sign in, and revel in the glory that is the Gmail search/conversation view/etc.
posted by nosila at 12:37 PM on June 2, 2022


Just a quick addendum: if you're not a techie type person, this is BY FAR the easiest way to have a Gmail account. Of course, there are apps for your phone too.
posted by nosila at 12:41 PM on June 2, 2022


As of the end of May, Google is forcing everyone to use the OAuth2 protocol for authentication in Gmail. Does WLM2012 not support OAuth2?

Thunderbird definitely does, and can be quickly and easily set-up to work with your Gmail accounts.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:05 PM on June 2, 2022


Response by poster: flabdablet, you rock! It turns out that Thunderbird is exactly what I was looking for. And it's Mozilla, which is a plus since I'm a big fan of Firefox.
posted by DrGail at 1:10 PM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


You're welcome. I used to use it every day and was always quite satisifed with it, despite seeing it succumb occasionally to utterly pointless and occasionally counterproductive fashion-driven UI "improvements" after updates.

These days, though, I mainly use Thunderbird for maintaining local email backups. My daily drivers are Fastmail's web UI on the desktop and their app on the phone, both of which are quick and capable and far stabler and less bloated, fashion-addled, inconsistent and confusing than Google's equivalents. Dumping GMail for a paid Fastmail service was the best email-related decision I've ever made.
posted by flabdablet at 1:38 PM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


FWIW, Google seems to have made some kind of change on June 1st that reset third-party access, hence your login troubles. I had the same thing happen to some of my iOS apps. But you should be able to log back in using app-specific passwords -- basically you have Google generate a unique password for just one service. I haven't used Thunderbird in a looong time, but you might have to do this to log into your Gmail account there, too. This page goes into some more detail on how.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:18 PM on June 2, 2022


I haven't used Thunderbird in a looong time, but you might have to do this to log into your Gmail account there, too

You don't. Thunderbird has supported Google's preferred OAuth2 login protocol since 2015, and chooses it by default when setting up a new connection to an existing GMail address.

Switching a legacy Thunderbird GMail account to OAuth2 requires only a visit to the Account Settings page and choosing OAuth2 instead of Password as the authentication method for its SMTP and IMAP/POP3 servers.

The only Thunderbird instances I've encountered in the wild that genuinely need to rely on Google's app-specific passwords mechanism run on machines that customers refuse to upgrade away from Windows XP; the last XP-compatible version of Thunderbird came out a couple of years before OAuth2 support was added. Yes, there are people who still use XP and find it completely satisfactory and haven't been afflicted by botnets or ransomware. It's not something I would ever choose to do but despite my best advice it demonstrably is still being done.

There have been occasional reports of Thunderbird losing the ability to connect to a mail account after switching authentication to OAuth2. In all cases I'm aware of, that issue has turned out not to be Thunderbird's fault and has been resolved by uninstalling the third party antivirus suite that actually caused it. And since there is really no longer any good reason to run any always-on antivirus other than the one MS now supplies as an official Windows component, that resolution strikes me as not only acceptable but positively beneficial.
posted by flabdablet at 4:05 AM on June 3, 2022


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