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Gmail Offline Imap Smtp
Getting the sup mail client to work with GMail(Imap+Smtp)/Google Apps with local mirroring
While sup has out-of-the-box support for reading email from imap, there isn't support for fetching all of your email and storing it locally. To top it off, the IMAP support is rather slow and there doesn't seem to be any SMTP support yet. Please note that this supports Gmail and Google Apps Domain Gmail. I haven't tested much of the former though.
We'll be using Offlineimap - a tool to mirror IMAP mail in many formats - to store our email in the Maildir format. We'll then set up msmtp - a package to send email through smtp - to use GMail's system to send messages.
This tutorial is tested on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). It should work suitably well on most other distributions. Sup installation is done through Ruby Gems, as that is the recommended method. First, we install the Gems package:
# sudo apt-get install rubygems
Now install the "sup" gem:
# sudo gem install sup
This should take a while but complete successfully. We also need two other packages - offlineimap and msmtp, installed by:
# sudo apt-get install offlineimap msmtp
Create a ~/.offlineimaprc and configure it based on my file. Intially, you might want to have the full ui so that you can see what is happening. If so, comment out the line "ui=Noninteractive.Quiet"
[general]
metadata = ~/.offlineimap
accounts = Personal, Account2
# ui = Noninteractive.Quiet # Enable this for running offlineimap in the background / as a cron job
#
[Account Personal]
autorefresh = 5
localrepository = MboxPersonal
remoterepository = ImapPersonal
#
[Account Account2]
autorefresh = 10
localrepository = MboxAccount2
remoterepository = ImapAccount2
#
[Repository MboxPersonal]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/personal/Mail?/Personal?
#
[Repository ImapPersonal]
type = Gmail
remoteuser = [email protected]
remotepass = password
#
[Repository MboxAccount2]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/personal/Mail?/Account2?
#
[Repository ImapAccount2]
type = Gmail
remoteuser = [email protected]
remotepass = password
Run offlineimap to download all of your messages. It should take a few minutes to complete.
Now navigate to the path where your mail has been downloaded and create a symlink to the folder: "[Gmail].All Mail" as "target" in the same path. The rationale for doing this is because sup has some issues with the maildir path when there are spaces, and other special characters in there. You might consider using INBOX or any of the maildirs for your seperate GMail labels.
Sup can use msmtp to send messages, instead of the built-in imap functionality. Create a ~/.msmtprc and specify names for the accounts. Your configuration file should look something like this:
account personalgmail
host smtp.gmail.com
from [email protected]
auth on
tls on
tls_certcheck off
user [email protected]
password password
port 587
account account2
host smtp.gmail.com
#
from [email protected]
auth on
tls on
tls_certcheck off
user [email protected]
password password
port 587
#
account default : personalgmail
If you don't specify your password in the text file, you will have to enter it every time you're sending an email.
Run sup-config and follow the "wizard". When asked to add a source, choose "maildir" and enter the complete path to the "target" folder. Try to avoid spaces and special characters in the path, as the paths will be converted into URI format.
Now run sup-sync, which will sync all your emails and index them. Run sup from the console which should show you the default UI with all your emails.
In ~/.sup/config.yaml, to each account, add the line
:sendmail: msmtp --account=personalgmail -t
So finally your account config looks like:
:accounts:
:default:
:signature: /home/user/.signature
:email: [email protected]
:name: Your Name
:sendmail: msmtp --account=personalgmail -t
Unfortunately, any changes you make inside sup, like reading, archiving, deleting, etc, will not be reflected in GMail. In other words - the syncing is only one way. While there is some work in progress to support two-way syncing, it still currently means that the best way to use sup is to leave GMail's web interface from regular use.
If you find any problems with this documentation, please email anirudh ATT anirudhsanjeev DOTTT org