[Alpine-info] Seeking someone who..?

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Sat, 2 Dec 2023, Steve Litt wrote:


> Am I reading this whole thread right? People are switching email

> clients, jumping through all sorts of hoops, and having panic attacks

> so they can work with Gmail? If that's so, the problem isn't Alpine or

> disabilities, it's Gmail.


I am not following the thread in depth. My personal concern would be 
mainly for gmail (Gsuite), but possibly the thread was mixing (or 
emphasizing) also other issues, as pointed out by others.


>> but the Master Password is a deal breaker.


I am still using Alpine 2.21 "all patch" on my work machine, so I have not 
encountered this issue yet, but I guess when I upgrade I will look into a 
way of disabling Master Password (since I usally, though seldom, build 
Alpine from source I think taht would not ber difficult).


> If I'm correct that this mess is all about Gmail, there's an easy

> solution: Ditch Gmail.


I would be glad to do it. Unfortunately that's not always possible. For 
instance my main e-mail address is my institutional one, and since some 5 
years we moved from homegrown sendmail to Gsuite, so my solution was to 
*circumvene* gmail.

(BTW I note that gmail authentication issues are being discussed in 
technical mailing list of forums like fetchmail and Epyrus (Pale Moon))

My arrangement so far has been to use fetchmail as described here 
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/WWW/WhereManWins/gs.html.

- First of all I used to store all my-email locally on my work
   machine. When travelling I could activate a local IMAP server
   and use alpine on a laptop to access it. Now that I'm mainly
   at home, I ssh to the work machine and work from there.

- I also had a lot of procmail ruls which used to process incoming
   mail and sort it out into folders.

- to mantain that, I use fetchmail to poll the Gsuite inbox every
   5 min, so mail is "delivered" locally and I can work exactluy as
   before

   (I also poll a secondary "civic network" POP avout twice per day.
   I would not trust using it for a heavy e-mail traffic though)

- I use alpine *directly* to access Gsuite in three cases *only*:

   a) occasionally to get at Gsuite inbox if I want to see something
      faster than 5 minutes

   b) daily to check false positives in Gsuite Spam (unfortunately
      it has more than our previous homegrown Spamassassin)

   c) daily to purge Gsuite Bin (I do not like keeping stuff there
      permanently; fetchmail is instructed to "retrieve and delete"
      but for Gsuite "delete" means "move to Bin"

- I virtually never use Gmail web interface (the simple HTML one),
   I guess once in five years, this summer when our work machines
   were switche off for maintenance

I am quite concerned about the moves of gmail moving away from IMAP 
sometimes next year. I am seeking solutions ...

- in principle I should be able to run a sendmail on my home machine,
   but this is not compatible with my cheap and simple connection (a
   router with a SIM, and no public IP, since it is behind CGNAT)

- I have been told I could get a VPS, and install there my sendmail
   and IMAP. Not sure of reliable providers, costs and effort.

- or perhaps I could find a local (free or cheap) provider (I used once
   one for tests)  which supports plain IMAP, and instruct Gsuite to route
   all my mail there (and get via fetchmail, unchanged)