[Fetchmail-users] my solution to recent gmail issues

[Lucio C. <lu...@la...>]

I have recently received a message that I *SHALL* move to 2 Factor 
Authentication in Gsuite, and, as I suspected, this broke my arrangement 
(which exists sicne years and years) and I took my counter-measures, and I 
wish to share.

In a nutshell what I wanted to achieve and what I did is:

(1) I want to have mail stored locally on my machine, and to have
      incoming mails processed by procmail (this is not just for my fun,
      I have a couple of cases where procmail post-processes mail from
      forms to update a local database for service reasons).

(2) The simplest way to feed incoming mails into procmail is to use
     fetchmail, which I am happily using since 2018, when my institution
     moved from howgrown sendmail to Gsuite

(3) The simplest way to have fetchmail working (after I activated
      2FA on Gsuite fetchmail was not authenticateds) is to "bypass" Gmail,
      i.e. instruct Gsuite to forward all mail to another provider which
      provides *standard* IMAP.

      This solves 98% of my problems, because

      - Spam is not forwarded from Gmail to the alternate provider
      - messages forwrded *and deleted* are not actually deleted
        but staged in Gmail's Bin for 30 days

(4)  The solution is ... "app passwords". Gmail with 2FA allows to
      define a 16-char password THEY generate to be used with what in
      the past were called provocatorily "less secure applications"

      So I generated such an "app passwords" and I can use it from my
      preferred mail client (Alpine). And this solves my problem.

(5)  Actually the same app password can work also with fetchmail,
      so in theory I would not need the alternate provider of point (3) and
      could work "as previously", but I left it in.

I had no need to move to OAUTH2, or learn it, or get an OAUTH2-capable 
version of fetchmail (I use the OS-bundled one).

I think I could be happy with the new arrangement.

I hope the above is useful to somebody else.

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Corti 12 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A middle rank researcher at end career is not rich but is in the top 5% 
of the Italian income tax taxpayers. Does it not sound strange ?