Re: [MIT-Scheme-users] IMAIL setup

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 03:28:05 -0500
   From: Charles Moss <address@hidden>

   I think my patience has run out trying to figure out how to configure
   IMAIL and stunnel to check my Gmail account.  But perhaps I will
   torture myself a little longer by asking only for pieces rather than
   the completed puzzle.

FYI, Gmail provides a weird IMAP interface which doesn't work terribly
well with vanilla IMAP clients such as IMAIL.  You can use it, but,
for example, labels are exposed not as flags but as folders -- and
duplicated `in' each folder corresponding to a label.  (Gmail has an
IMAP extension that exposes labels with an interface similar to IMAP
flags, but IMAIL doesn't know about it.)  I seem to recall there was
some other major issue too (uidvalidities changing often?), but I
don't remember the details.

   Do I need to use stunnel to access Gmail?  (As
   <URL:https://support.google.com/mail/troubleshooter/1668960> reports
   that both Incoming and Outgoing Mail Servers have Requires SSL:Yes,
   and as no encryption is built in to IMAIL, I conclude that I do need
   to use stunnel.  But do I, really?)

You need to talk SSL or TLS to the Gmail servers.  I use socat for the
purpose -- less configuration than stunnel:

socat tcp4-listen:143,bind=127.0.0.1,reuseaddr,fork 
openssl:mail.google.com:993,cafile=/path/to/google/ca.pem

(If you have a systemwide CA certificate set installed, the cafile
option may not be necessary.)  Everything below about stunnel applies
to socat too.

   Do I need to run an IMAP daemon on my computer for stunnel to connect
   to?  (This might go to show just how damn confused I am about
   stunnel.)

No.  Stunnel behaves like a local IMAP daemon.

   Do I need to generate a certificate to get stunnel to do its thing?

No.  Stunnel need act only as a TLS client, not as a TLS server, for
your purposes.

   Do I need to include the port (that is, ":993") in imail-default-imap-server?

Not unless you have stunnel listen on a port other than 143.  I talk
to multiple IMAP servers at once, so I use different port numbers --
10143, 20143, 30143, &c. -- to disambiguate, but if you only ever want
to talk to Gmail and you don't mind running stunnel as root then port
143 is enough.

   Do I need "@gmail.com" to finish imail-default-user-id?

Maybe.  That was necessary when I used IMAIL with a non-gmail.com
Gmail domain.

   Does IMAIL prompt for a password?  Should it?  (Else, where does IMAIL
   get login information?  I have nowhere entered my password.  In which
   configuration file should I enter it?)

Yes.  IMAIL will cache it for half an hour, but has no mechanism for
storing it persistently and securely.  (This is a bug, but fixing it
is nontrivial.)

   If anyone who has figured this out and understands that I am asking
   the wrong questions to understand how this works, what are the right
   (or, at least, better) questions?

I think this should be enough to get you started.

   Do my router / gateway firewall settings matter?  Should they?

No.