Hacking Gmail

14 Part I — Starting to Use Gmail

Table 2-1 Pop Settings in Gmail

The Setting What You Set It To

Incoming Mail (POP3) Server requires SSL pop.gmail.com

Use SSL: Yes

Port: 995

Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server requires TLS smtp.gmail.com (use authentication)

Use Authentication: Yes

Use STARTTLS: Yes (some clients call this SSL)

Port: 465 or 587

Account Name Your Gmail username (including @gmail.com)

E-mail Address Your full Gmail e-mail address ([email protected])

Password Your Gmail password

IMAP for Gmail

Gmail’s features, the labeling and stars specifically, do not have counterparts in the

standard e-mail world. There’s no facility within any e-mail format to apply labels,

for example, to your mail. It’s not surprising, therefore, that there is no existing

mail application that could understand or use them. Mail exported from Gmail

does not take its label with it.

Nor once the mail has been exported can the exported copy have any effect on the

original. Moving an exported mail into a different locally stored folder doesn’t

change anything on Gmail itself.

Both of these facts are, in my view, great disadvantages to the idea of offline work-

ing with Gmail. The first is a difficult problem, but the second can be solved by

replacing the Pop interface with one based on another standard: IMAP.

Gmail does not support IMAP at the time of this writing. No matter: The second

half of this book looks at building a Gmail-to-IMAP proxy server.

And Now

In this chapter, you have moved your existing mail over to Gmail, integrated

Gmail into your desktop, and looked at settings that will allow you to access

Gmail from other applications and devices. Altogether, this means that Gmail can

now be used as your primary e-mail application.

In the next chapter, you look at ways to improve how you use Gmail itself: power

tips and the tricks of the advanced user. Once you know those, you can move on

to reverse engineering Gmail and use it to power your own applications.