Hacking Gmail

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 ([e-mail])
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.
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