Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with imap

Where to put my personal e-mail?

grouse — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:34:45 -0800

What should I use for personal e-mail over IMAP? Soon my university will shut off the e-mail service I have been using for my personal e-mail over the last few years. I'm looking for a replacement through which I can quickly get e-mail through secure IMAP. It would be best if the service had some sort of server-side filtering, preferably with Sieve, or even procmail (slightly less preferred).

Gmail is pretty good and what I will switch to if I don't receive any better recommendations. Of course the search is great. I don't like two aspects, though. First, access over IMAP is slow, at least compared to other IMAP servers I have used. I would prefer something much faster. Second, I am somewhat concerned about Google knowing even more about me, although perhaps I should be just as concerned about any other provider.

I also probably could get an e-mail inbox through Comcast, although I am wary of Comcast in general.

I'm happy to keep using the university's forwarding service as my From: address, so getting my own domain isn't essential.

Cheaper is best obviously, but I'd be willing to pay for something that was superior to the free options.

Help me use GMail Better

arniec — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:25:14 -0800

My company recently switched from a standard POP mail server to having GMail as our MX server and hosting all our business accounts. Overall the benefits are quite positive, but I'm having some usage issues that bug me. Can you help me use gmail better? Specific questions inside. Part 1: I love the benefit of the IMAP mail system, allowing my inbox to be anywhere I am, rather than centralized around a specific computer. Previously I had my POP work account for 3 years and amassed thousands of emails coming in at about 4GB, all of which I must keep for reference of correspondence, e-mail addresses, etc. I had my mail sorted into folders, about 30-40 different folders depending on correspondence type. All of that mail was in Outlook until I recently became a Mac convert. Now it's all in Thunderbird.

So I can have ALL my mail available where I can get to it from anywhere, I'd like to migrate it all to GMail. I read that using IMAP I can just drag these old e-mails into my Inbox folder in Thunderbird, but given that I have about 40 folders, I'm not sure how to get them to GMail without just having a very large Inbox with a conglomeration of e-mails in it. I am guessing I could drag one folder to the Inbox, then organize that on Gmail, drag another folder, etc. but that leads me to problem #2:

Part 2: I know GMail uses labels...are there no folders? Would I need to drag in the e-mails, then label them all to use GMail's label system instead of my current folder-based system? And is that the most efficient way to do this?

Part 3: I am really NOT a fam of the "message threading" that GMail does. Often I will send solicitations to business partners and each subject line will be identical, the messages nearly so. However because the subject lines are the same, GMail takes e-mails from different business partners and puts them all in one thread, filling me with paranoia of sending the wrong e-mail to the wrong person or, worse, sending an entire e-mail chain from one business partner to another business partner which may contain confidential data. Is there any way to alter the functionality or, perhaps ideally, turn OFF this "feature" in GMail?

Part 4: As I'm still new to GMail, any "Power User" tips for me?

Final Notes: I still plan on using Thunderbird as my client of choice when at my work PC. I just want the ability to have ALL my mail accessible from ANY location as I feel it will enable me to work more efficiently, rather than having to hold some e-mails until I get back to my primary PC.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Yes, I know I sent that email four seconds ago...

freudenschade — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:33:59 -0800

Gmail IMAP + Thunderbird: I set up Thunderbird as my email client last week, and everything has been smooth sailing until today. When I opened T-bird, every email I've ever written was in my Inbox! Please make it stop! As of this morning, every email I send appears immediately in my Inbox (both in Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface). I created and ran a filter in T-bird that moved all emails "from" my address to "Gmail > Sent Mail" -- this moved all the old emails, but new ones keep appearing in the Inbox, and I'd really rather not have to run that filter all the time.

Notes about my setup:
- Google Apps Gmail
- Thunderbird 2.0.0.16
- Have IMAP for the same account set up in Outlook 2007, which I open occasionally to for email testing purposes
- Some filters set up within Gmail and T-bird, none of which have any settings regarding Sent Mail

I can provide other details as well if it would help. Any insight would be very much appreciated.

Can you tunnel via SSH to access Gmail via IMAP in Outlook when the ports are blocked?

izicwe — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:47:40 -0800

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a power user when it comes to mail servers, SSH, Gmail, and Outlook, but this one has me stumped! I use Outlook for both work and personal e-mail, but while on the network at work our ports are pretty locked down. How might I access my Gmail account via IMAP in Outlook while on a locked-down network? Ports 25, 110, 143, 587, 993, etc., are all blocked. In order to access personal e-mail, I connect via SSH (PuTTY) to my DreamHost mail server and tunnel POP/SMTP (ports 110 and 25) traffic over that SSH session. Is there any way I could use that SSH connection to tunnel to Gmail's servers for IMAP access as well? If not using that tunnel, is there another way? I can access Gmail through a web browser, but my objective is to be able to collect all my e-mail in Outlook as well. Thanks!

Help get my wife's e-mail to the Gmail lifeboat!

escabeche — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:00:52 -0800

Escabechette has years of old e-mail stored on an old school account that's soon going to close. We want to move all this e-mail to her gmail account. Apparently this is now easy because "GMail supports IMAP." But I haven't succeeded in finding instructions (on AskMeFi or elsewhere) which are suitable for someone, like me, who doesn't know what the word "IMAP" means. Is this really easy? And can you explain to this naif how to do it? More relevant data:

* Her school e-mail client is pine -- I think this means her mail is stored in "mbox" format.
* Our access to the school account is via ssh, so whatever I would do there would have to be on the command line. This makes it hard for me to see how I could use programs like GML (which does say it supports pine.) Alternatively, if there is some giant file somewhere in her account which contains all the mail, I could scp it to my Mac and work locally, if that's helpful.
* Ideally, the transfer would preserve dates and times, the folders in which the back e-mail is stored, and so on.

nokia n95 password encryption

raphael19 — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:29:10 -0800

Does Nokia N95 encrypts e-mail passwords that it stores for automatic retrieval? If it does, what is the encryption scheme? AES? Proprietary code? I am currently using IMAP functionality and i am curious if some malicious code run in web browser (or some other trick for that matter) could leak sensitive information such as the stored email passwords.

Regards.

Thunderbird/IMAP doesn't update correctly

one_bean — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:35:42 -0800

Why do messages keep showing up as new / undeleted in my IMAP Thunderbird e-mail? I'm not sure if this is an issue with the IMAP server or my settings in Thunderbird, but at least a couple of times a day I'll mark an e-mail as read or delete an e-mail, and then a few minutes later the e-mails show back up either as unread or undeleted. I'm guessing it has to do with the timing of when Thunderbird checks the server, or maybe something is not getting correctly updated. The server administrator can be somewhat unresponsive, so if there's something I can try while I wait to hear from him, I'd appreciate it.

IMAP Annoyances

Zinger — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:58:19 -0800

Incredibly annoying IMAP problem - Any ideas? We are constantly getting dialogue boxes popping up in outlook 2007 with the following message:

"Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long"

Under details, the error code is: 0x800CCCDD

These boxes are popping up *at least* every 10 minutes - sometimes you can get 5-6 of these in a row in the space of 20 seconds! They are exceptionally irritating not least because they require us to click OK, but also because they almost always steal focus away from the window we're working in. It's like being poked with a sharp stick all day.

We have tried (based on searching Google):

- changing the Outlook server timeout settings to 10 minutes
- disabling automatic send and receive for the IMAP emails

Neither of these have improved the situation. Help?

Have I offended Google?

gergtreble — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:13:51 -0800

Where has my Google Apps IMAP gone? Ive been using Google apps for your domain email over IMAP for a few months now. I use Thunderbird as my mail client. I just tried to send an email and I got a pop up saying:

"IMAP is not avaqilable for your account (Failure)"

So I logged into the web version and went to see if the setting had been accdentaly switched off. Imagine my surprise to see that the setting is just not there any more! I still have the option to get my mail over POP but where there used to be an option to get my mail by IMAP there is nothing!

Do google hate me? Why have they taken away my IMAP?

How can I get my IMAP Mail back?

4ster — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:51:47 -0800

Using Mail.app in Tiger and now all of my IMAP email is gone. Please help. My ISP (Embarq) gives me POP e-mail, which I forward to Fastmail.fm, so I can have IMAP. I access my IMAP mail in Apple Mail (Tiger).

Last night, something happened where I stopped getting email. Either Embarq stopped forwarding or Fastmail stopped receiving. I decided to just cut out Fastmail, and go back to receiving plain old POP in Mail.app.

When I did this, I lost my IMAP folders and all of the e-mail in them. No problem, I thought. I make regular backups with SuperDuper!, so I'll just go back to my most recent backup and then turn off Airport. I do this, and there are my IMAP folders and in them, the mail I so desperately need.

Yet here's the problem: Mail.app won't let me move the e-mail to a local folder, giving me an error message simply saying the email can't be moved. When I connect to Airport and go online, all my folders and the mail inside of them gets deleted, because the folders and the mail in them isn't on Fastmail's servers anymore.

How can I preserve the e-mail in these folders so that I can simply start over again?

How do you deal w. all that old email?

ManInSuit — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:20:31 -0800

I'm curious how people deal w. their old email. (esp those using Outlook and IMAP, but others, too...) Hi. I’ve asked a related question here before, and seen others who have asked related stuff, too. But I still haven’t found an answer that quite works for me, so I thought I’d try again.

I assume I’m not particularly unusual in how I handle my email:

- I send and receive tons of mail
- I like to spend as little time as possible filing/sorting it. (Most of my mail just goes into a giant “done” folder when I’m finished with it)
- I like to be able to search it, fast. I do this a lot. My email history is kind of my life and my filing system.
- I keep more or less everything
- I like to be able to access my mail when I’m offline on my laptop (though I guess, really, I do this less and less often, as net access is more ubiquitous)
- I also like to be able to access archives of my email from the web when I’m away from my computer.

What I use now is:
- MS-Outlook 2003 (about to upgrade to 2007): I like it pretty well, and would rather not change, though I would if there were some perfect do-everything other solution.
- Lookout to search my email. (Which I’m guessing I might not need when I switch to Outlook 2007).
- I use fastmail.fm as an IMAP server, and occasionally use their web interface to get at my mail when away from my computer.

Things mostly work pretty well.

The problem is that dealing with old email is a hassle. The biggest problem is that Outlook gets slow and unreliable as my PST file gets enormous. A less-pressing problem is that eventually I may run of space on fastmail (a 4 GB limit).

I figure I shouldn’t have to make Outlook open my Entire Mail History From Forever every time I open it up. Most of the time, I only need immediate access to, say, email from the past year or two. But once in a while, I need to be able to get at the older stuff. When I do, I’d like to be able to do a reasonably quick, powerful search.

There must be some useful way to keep my older mail separate, in a reasonably searchable form, but I haven’t figure it out.

I’m really curious: How do other people deal with this?

Is there an easy way to use multiple outlook psts and have them all be searchable?

Is there an easy way to remove folder/messages from an outlook PST while leaving them on the IMAP server? (I’d just as soon leave those old messages up there. There's tons of space on the server…)

Am I foolish to be using outlook for all this? Mostly, I like it well, but its crappiness in the face of large PST’s is really annoying.

Thanks, Green, for any ideas!

Leopard, Apple Mail & IMAP Issues

aladfar — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:27:42 -0800

Leopard, Apple Mail & IMAP issues: Since upgrading to Leopard, Apple Mail seems sluggish and unresponsive. The application is effectively unusable. It's gotten to the point where I'm using webmail access on all of my machines. Is this an issue with Apple Mail or have I misconfigured something (I use Dreamhost for my personal email accounts). On another note: Is there a better, more usable mail application I should consider? Should I go back to POP? Advice on all fronts is appreciated - my mail situation is a bit of a mess right now.

Thunderbird woes.

sneakin — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:30:48 -0800

Thunderbird is messing up my outgoing attachments. Please help. When I send Word attachments (hasn't happened with .ppt or .pdf) the recipient gets a "binary file" attachment they cannot open. When I look at my sent mail, the attachments show as files with no extension and either a blank white square or a picture of a jack in the box (I know, wtf?). I am on a Mac, os 10.5.2, Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 and am IMAP'd to my Gmail account. This is driving me bananas. I read a bunch of threads including this one and did everything they suggested, to no avail.

I can open attachments I receive, although if it's a Word doc, I have to go through the whole song and dance of selecting Microsoft Word from my apps-- the attachment doesn't look like a Word app and T'bird doesn't recognize it as such. The icon is a picture of a jack in the box.

Please help me with synchronising cleanly

dance — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:34:21 -0800

Mail.app + Nokia e61 + gApps IMAP I would love to get my already fairly nifty Mail situation properly synchronised. At the moment, Google Apps handles my email for me and I access it via POP with Mail.app. It is also forwarded to MailForExchange where I am able to sychronise it with my Nokia e61. If I'm out, therefore, I can access and reply to emails. When I get back, though, my sent items in Mail do not reflect mails sent from the phone because gApps had nothing to do with that. In addition, emails read on the e61 are still unread in Mail.app.

What I would love to do is begin using IMAP with gApps but without disturbing the current archive of email I have in Mail.app and begin accessing my email on my phone by that method also.

How can I do this? Do I have to drag my folders into the IMAP folders? This is Mail 3, by the way.

Apple Mail and iSync - can they tame the beast?

Capri — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 04:40:54 -0800

I want my email messages to be in the same state (read, deleted, filed, sent) on three different Macintoshes. Will iSync do what I want? Is there another solution to the chaos? I have three Macintoshes, all running Leopard. I have three email accounts, two IMAP (Gmail and .Mac) and one POP (my own domain, hosted by GoDaddy). The POP is my primary account, and the two IMAPs are used maybe 5% of the time. I've set the POP account to keep messages on the server for a week after retrieval.

I use Apple Mail for all three accounts, and mail from each account comes into my Inbox. I have a large complex hierarchy of folders on my Mac that I put messages into.

The problem is that when I receive, read, and either file or delete a message from my POP account on one computer, it has no effect on the message on the other two computers. So if I don't boot up one of the computers for a week or so, when I do finally boot that one up, I get 500 new messages -- all of which I've already dealt with on one of my other computers. I want all three of my computers to by synched so that I don't have to deal with each message three separate times. Also, any mail sent from one computer appears only in that computer's sent box; I can't access it from the other two computers.

By contrast, if I delete a message from an IMAP account, it disappears from all three computers (this is good). The same works for sent messages - they appear in the Sent box of all three computers. But if I file a message on one computer, it disappears from the other two. This is not good - I want it filed on all three computers in the same folder.

(I recognize that this is the way POP and IMAP accounts work; none of what I've just said surprises me.)

What can I do so that all three computers have the same messages in the inbox, the sent box, and each of the folders in the hierarchy?

I tried using iSync, but it didn't seem to do anything; I am not sure if I set it up correctly. If I convert my POP account to IMAP, and then move a message from my Inbox to a folder on my Mac, or send a message from one computer, could I get iSync to make a copy of it to the same folder on a different Mac so that I can still access that message on my other two computers?

Also, I sort of like having a web-based way to get to my email (and having my old emails there, even if they're all unread and in the inbox) for those rare occasions when I am using someone else's computer. But this is a much lower priority than just wrangling my new messages into control.

Thanks so much. This is all rather overwhelming, and I just can't find a way to make it all manageable.

Stop Gmail from downloading All Mail folder

qwip — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:22:43 -0800

I've been using Mail.app with OS X Leopard as a front end to my Gmail account. And it works great, for the most part. Unfortunately it seems to download both my "Inbox" and also the "All Mail" folder from Gmail. This has the effect of increasing the amount of messages in Mail.app significantly, and I want it to stop. Is there a way to unsubscribe to the "All Mail" folder with out effecting the "Inbox"? There is a grayed out subscribe/unsubscribe preference when performing a "Get Info" on the account in Mail.app, so it seems like there is at least a potential to do this. Or am I alone in being the only one bothered by this?

I just don't need to see the "All Mail" folder and it makes searches for emails through Spotlight come up twice. Annoying.

Gmail, IMAP, and Outlook: a ménage à trois of questionable proportions.

phaded — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:07:26 -0800

Two questions regarding the use of Outlook 2007 and Gmail's IMAP. Here are the questions; detailed explanations inside. -I use Gmail to pull mail and send from two other e-mail accounts. Is there a way to set Outlook up to do the same? -When I open Outlook, it creates a label called "Junk E-mail" in Gmail. Is there a way to stop this? I'm working on setting Outlook 2007 up to use Gmail through IMAP, as I do prefer using a desktop client. In order to fully make the switch, though, I've got a couple little things I haven't figured out and would like help with.

As mentioned above, I use Gmail to pull my e-mail from three accounts: my Gmail account, my ISP e-mail account, and my school e-mail. In addition to pulling messages from the ISP and school accounts, it also lets me send messages from those two addresses. How do I duplicate this with Outlook? I know I can add another account, but I don't need it to check messages on those accounts; I only need to send messages from them. (Also, if anyone knows how to do this with Apple Mail and the iPhone's mail, that information would be appreciated, as I use Mail from time to time and will be using the iPhone's mail in the summer, when I get one.)

The second question is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless, so I am including it here! Because Outlook has a hard-wired folder for spam called "Junk E-mail", when I open Outlook and then go back to the web interface for Gmail, I've got a label with that same name. I can delete it from there, but it's back the next time I open Outlook. Is there a way to disable this? If that means I have to disable Outlook's spam filtering, that's fine; Gmail does a good job of that, and Outlook sometimes ends up with false positives.

Thanks in advance, guys.

Mismarried Mac, Mac, Mac

prophetsearcher — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:59:34 -0800

How can I sync, and keep in sync, my Powerbook G4 (tiger) & Mac Mini (leopard)? SoSorryForAskingThisPleaseDontEggMeFilter:

I'm surprised that there isn't a streamlined way of accomplishing what I imagine would be a routine setup, but there you have it. How do you achieve this? Help me find the best solution, if not the perfect one.

My Goal:
To be able to use either of my two computers at will, and have them stay up-to-date with one another. I use my laptop to lounge around the house, meet with clients, etc. I use the Mac Mini for intensive work. I use both for common tasks like email and working on documents.

My Setup:
- Powerbook G4 - PPC - Tiger - 80gb
- Mac Mini - Intel - Leopard - 120gb - new.
- Several external harddrives, including an iPod Classic 160gb
- One of the hard drives is a Lacie Ethernet 500gb, but I doubt my poor Internet setup (see below) can do anything useful with it. and I'm not sure I know how to use it really
- Slow internet connection with a Belkin N1 wireless router (can't change)
- I use SuperDuper to back up my Powerbook

What I've Tried:
- An initial Migration Assistant -- I get an inexplicable error message each time I attempt it. It hasn't worked. I set up my Powerbook as the target disk, the Mac Mini recognized it, but the actual sync failed.

- dotMac subscription -- I tried the demo, even though I really don't want to pay for it in the future, and the notdotmac thing just scares me. Still, it doesn't seem that it will be the panacea I'm looking for, in that it IMAPs and has a 10gb limit, which I don't imagine to be enough (I have about 8 email accounts and a LOT of attachments). And, it's pricey.

- gmail-imap-mail.app -- I've been using POP3 on my powerbook with my gmail accounts, and think it's the bee's knees. I really didn't want to go down the IMAP route, since I want the messages to be all stored locally, and instantly readable. Still, I gave it a chance with a throwaway gmail account. I saw why it could work, but it's so... very... slow... It can sometimes take *minutes* to open a simple message. I realize this is likely the fault of my ISP or whatever, but there's not much I can do about it. I might decide to bear with it if y'all convince me it's the way to go -- and if it can sync the sent messages and statuses of my email/gmail on both my machines.

My Questions: it's really all one big question, but I'll break it down for simplicity's sake
1. Should/could I use my already-used Leopard disk to upgrade my Powerbook, so I can more simply use File Sharing and integrate the systems, and use Chronosync easily?
2. ChronoSync. Has anyone used it in this sort of situation? I don't trust myself to run a sync every time I switch computers, which is what the program seems to want, to avoid 'erratic results.' I see that a new version is out soon. Maybe it will be more foolproof?
3. If I do switch to IMAP, does that mean that all of my POPped emails will be overwritten, unfiled, unmarked as read? Should I sync the messages first to the other computer and then switch?
4. dotMac. Should I give it another chance? If I use POP on each of my computers to the same account (assuming this works) - will dotMac keep them synced -- as in, what's been read, what's been deleted, what's been sent?
5. How else can I creatively achieve harmony?

I've seen the other threads on the topic, but none are as fully integrated as I hope. I apologize if this post seems fussy, finicky and finical. I'm just looking for your solutions to a similar setup.

Followup Question: Getting popped Yahoo mails back into email account

sk381 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:47:15 -0800

As a follow up to this question, can I use the following scheme to get all my popped emails back into my Yahoo account? If I create a new Gmail account, set it to forward all 'new' incoming mail to an existing Yahoo email (the one that I had downloaded all the emails via POP in the first place), mark all my popped emails as unread in ThunderBird, and upload them into my new Gmail account via IMAP, will they be treated as 'new emails' and hence forwarded to my Yahoo account?

I tried to use one of the suggestions given in response to my previous question, but I think Gmail requires SSL which the 'Add an External Mail Account' of Yahoo doesn't support at the moment.

Can we read the same email without tears?

al_fresco — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:48:49 -0800

Help me use email in a multi-user environment. IMAP is great, but not for more than one user at a time. My boss operates a business where people register for classes through a website. An HTML form generates an email. Administrator checks email for registration details and enters details in a (hosted) FileMaker database, which then sends confirmation email.

All of this worked fine when all of the business could be dealt with by one person, or even one person at a time. Now, the business has grown to the point where there is often a need for two people to be processing the emails at one time, two people at two different desks in two different locations. We have an IMAP email account, and messages are often duplicated when both email clients (Mail.app) are connected at the same time. We also use third-party software (MailTags) to add keywords and notes to individual emails. We now minimize the errors by turning off automatic synching, but there are still collisions and gaps. Users communicate via iChat.

The business is not large enough to warrant shelling out for expensive large-scale enterprise solution. We want the ability to have two or more people at two or more workstations accessing the same information from the same email account at the same time, and to be able to make other users aware of the actions they have taken on those emails, without having to create a separate log.

The hosted FileMaker database works well enough (two users can update the database at the same time, just not the same record). Is there a similar solution for email? Should we somehow route the email account through its own hosted FM database and work from that?

Ideas? Thoughts? Thanks!

IMAP proxying help needed

whir — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:01:58 -0800

My work's firewall recently began blocking outbound traffic that isn't on ports 22, 80, and 443, and I'd like to use my home router (running openwrt) to proxy my personal IMAP email so I can read it from work. I'm pretty network and linux-savvy, but I haven't really tried this out before, so I thought I'd solicit some advice. What I figure is that I'll point to my home address via dyndns or the like and then, for requests originating from my work subnet, forward the requests on to my ISP's imap server. Here's some k-R4d ascii art to illustrate what I'm going for:

[work PC] ----> [work firewall] ---> [home router] --->      [isp]

pc.work.com     fw.work.com          myrouter.dyndns.org     imap.isp.net

So on my router, I want to forward requests for router.dyndns.org:443 to imap.isp.net:143.

I'm running the latest version of Thunderbird as an email client. At home I have OpenWRT running on a Linksys WRT54G (it's running the release before kamikaze, IIRC, but I can upgrade it easily enough if I need to). I'd like to run whatever software I need to on the router itself, so I don't need to keep a machine in my home network on all the time and poke a hole in my home firewall.

Has anyone had experience with doing this? In particular I'm wondering if the IMAP protocol itself involves my client sending out its own IP address (pc.work.com) and then confusing the IMAP server at imap.isp.net, which should actually be talking to myrouter.dyndns.org.

My iptables skills are a little rusty, so if anyone has specific examples of the commands to use, I'd be grateful.

Also, could someone tell me if there's a better solution than just forwarding the raw TCP traffic? Is this something setting up a SOCKs server on myrouter.dnydns.org could solve? I do have one other IMAP account I'd like to access if I could, and I wouldn't mind getting around my workplace's HTTP content filters if I can do so easily. Neither one of these concerns is a big deal, though - mostly I just want to be able to access my personal email account. And now that I'm thinking about it, I'd like to be able to send SMTP mail from pc.work.com through my ISP if I can, too, without letting spammers use my router for nefarious purposes.

I've also seen some linux software out there specifically for proxing imap (called "imapproxy" or something?), but I didn't see a version compiled for openwrt specifically - I'm not adverse to setting up a wrt toolchain if I need to, but I'd rather not spend time on that if there's an easier way.

Pine and gmail together at last

31d1 — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:31:50 -0800

Maybe you can help me figure out my incredibly interesting gmail IMAP vs Pine problem. According to gmail, the only non-label folder you want to really map to a special IMAP folder is the Drafts folder. If you are still with me ... Basically, pine always thinks I have a postponed-message. I am not sure if this happened as soon as I set the folder, or if it didn't happen until I saved a draft and then removed it. The details are:

I set my postponed messages folder to:
postponed-folder={imap.gmail.com/user=username@gmail/ssl/novalidate-cert}[Gmail]/Drafts

When I go to compose a new message, I am always prompted to continue my postponed composition (which no longer exists). If I answer yes, I receive the following errors:


[>Empty folder!  No messages really postponed!<]

[>Internal folder cannot be deleted. (Failure)<]

[Can't delete
{gmail-imap.l.google.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert/user="username@gmail.com"}[Gmail]/Drafts]

I can then continue, and cancel the message without error, however the next time I go to compose a message I am asked if I want to continue the postponed-message

Googing for the error messages has people saying to remove the ~/mail/postponed-msgs file, however, my postponed-msgs is mapped to [Gmail]/Drafts

If I map the postponed-msgs to another folder, like just Drafts, which creates a label in gmail ([Imap]/Drafts), I can get it to complain of an empty folder, but canceling the message works, and I am no longer prompted to continue it.

I'm not really sure at this point if I'm broken, if gmail is broken, if I broke gmail, if it's a pine thing, or an Imap thing, therefore I humbly request advice.

Did I manage to stick a file on gmail that I can't delete? Did I fail at pine config 101? Is it a faux-pas to admit to using pine in the first place?

How do I integrate e-mail using work and Gmail IMAP?

zooropa — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:25:42 -0800

How do I use Gmail's new IMAP with my existing Exchange e-mail? I work for a small business that uses a hosted Exchange account for e-mail (Intermedia is the host). I use Outlook 2007 to send/receive e-mail.

I also use Google's gmail service for my personal e-mail.

I'd like to be able to integrate the two services and use Outlook as the home base. Here are my questions:

* Can I access Gmail from Outlook using IMAP?

* Do I have to do anything special to send/receive my e-mail from the hosted Exchange account on Intermedia?

* Is there a way to send e-mail from Outlook 2007 so that it still includes the correct "From:" address? In other words, work e-mail still reads as being from "me@workemail.com" and personal e-mail still reads as being from "me@gmail.com".

Links to proper tutorials would be definitely helpful if you have them. Thanks!

How do I get push-imap with my own server and and iPhone?

darkshade — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:24:58 -0800

Any suggestions on how I could get push-imap with my own IMAP server? I'm running cyrus-imap, and the client in question is an iPhone. The iPhone (allegedly) supports push-imap (p-imap internet draft) with Yahoo mail. Is there some sort of proxy I could stick in front of my imap server to get the desired behavior? Maybe I should suck it up and implement it myself?

I've already verified that cyrus doesn't support it, and won't until it's actually a standards track protocol extension. (which is completely reasonable...)

ASP VBScript Email question

gatorbiddy — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:12:54 -0800

How can I do a simple logon to a POP3 account using ASP/VBScript? I just need to logon to an email account IMAP or POP3 (hosted on my network) given a username and password and then exit the session. How would I accomplish this in ASP/VBScript? I've tried creating a WScript object and running telnet from within that, but it is not having the same effect as it does in the command window, and it seems like there is a better solution anyhow (but maybe not?). Google is not helping by returning the countless email components out there that I feel are overkill for this simple task. Thanks in advance!