May 30th 2022, Google and IMAP

[A. F. Cano]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 12:53:35PM +0100, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> [Apologies if you get this twice!]
> 
> So it appears that on May 30th Google is going to cut off "good old"
> IMAP access to GMail (as if email is such an inherently secure medium
> that you really need that additional login security...). If I hadn't
> come to depend on having around 15Gb of free remote email storage with
> (remote filtering into) lots of folders I'd jump ship now, but I
> wouldn't really know where.

Well, not remote and not managed for you,  but the next release
(migrating to stable in a few days) of FreedomBox
(https://www.freedombox.org), is finally adding a mail server.
This project is designed to decentralize the internet and
provide the usual cloud services on inexpensive hardware with easy
setup and no maintenance.  It is steadily being improved.  I've been
running one for years and couldn't do without it.

> I suppose KMail5 will continue to work, but not KMail4 which I still
> vastly prefer. I know some of you use claws as a fallback ... what
> options will there be to continue to use a traditional imap client
> with GMail?

The filtering into multiple folders I do with xbuffy and procmail. but I
don't use Kmail.  The server part at least would be handled by the
FreedomBox.

I am curious, isn't the filtering and sorting into folders a function of
the client? Doesn't Kmail do that? 

> I suppose it should be possible to write an interface that connects
> to GMail via a sanctioned method and presents itself as a standard
> IMAP server to email clients. Maybe such a thing exists already?

One of the reasons I'm not using gmail any more is the constant changes
and the collection of information (in the name of security) by google.  
I want to set up something (like email), get it to work and then forget
about it.

I hope this helps somehow.  Once I set up the FreedomBox mail server, I
plan to try it with Kmail, in addition to my regular
fetchmail/procmail/xbuffy/mutt setup.

Augustine