[Alpine-info] Continued gmail difficulties

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2022, gajs-f0el at dea.spamcon.org wrote:


> I have tried, using help Eduardo offered in an earlier response, to 

> start afresh on saving passwords to disk. But I can't tell whether or 

> not I've met with success. Here is the reason. Each time I try to check 

> e-mail on one of my two gmail accounts, I am prompted to enter a 

> password. And each time I enter the password, I am asked whether I want 

> to save the password to disk, I hit "y." And I have to do this 3 times 

> each time I try to check e-mail for each folder under each of the two 

> accounts before the folder I am trying to check will open and display 

> the e-mails contained in it (on the first 2 tries I see the message 

> "Retrying PLAIN authentication after [AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] Invalid 

> credentials (Failure)"). This development has made dealing with e-mail 

> quite an onerous task.

>

> Assuming I am in a minority of Alpine users in confronting these issues, 

> what could I be doing wrong here? I followed the directives presented on 

> the "Authorizing Alpine Access to Gmail Email Services" page and set up 

> projects for each account. I saved the client-id and client-secret per 

> the instructions. I entered the access code and pasted it at the prompt 

> as directed. My version of Alpine is 2.25.1, gotten via the Void Linux 

> repositories.


It seems that you are still using username/password authentication, and 
once that fails Alpine moves to using xoauth2. For technical reasons 
Alpine attempts to use username/password before it attempts xoauth2, so in 
order to use xoauth2 first you need to tell Alpine explictly to try that, 
and that is done by adding /auth=xoauth2 to the definition of the server, 
so in addition to

imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=Yourid at gmail.com

you need to add /auth=xoauth2 to that to make it look like

imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=Yourid at gmail.com/auth=xoauth2

I hope this helps.

-- 
Eduardo