Accessing gmail from the commandline
shadebug
me, on a whim, that it might be useful if I could telnet into their
servers and check to see what's actually there when something's up
(for instance, I recently set up a customer's account, not gmail, and
of her hundreds of mailboxes the only one it retrieved was a single
subsubsubfolder despite her webmail client showing me all sorts of
wonderful stuff). I soon discovered that this is actually pretty easy
and was quickly able to log into and peruse email using telnet for my
personal domain and ssl for yahoo's secure servers. When I tried it on
gmail, however, it was happy to login (that is to say authenticate,
not just open the connection) and then nothing else worked. Even the
logout command did nothing.
So the question here is, why?
Marko Vukovic
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Marko
shadebug
straight openssl? How would that even work and would I need to install
anything (telnet and openssl are things I can expect to find within
metres of me wherever I am)?
It's all very well and good that pop3 works but I'm not going to
subject anybody to that.
EdD
On Dec 15, 2:56 pm, Marko Vukovic <marko.vuko...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I assume you are using Telnet over stunnel or the like and attempting to
> talk IMAP.
>
> Using OpenSSL I see the same symptom as you, can login but no response to
> commands. Weird!
> $ openssl s_client -connect imap.gmail.com:993
> .
> .
> .
> * OK Gimap ready for requests from xx.xx.xx.xx e4if4030674wiv.185
> 01 login marko.vuko...@gmail.com **********
> * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XLIST CHILDREN
> X-GM-EXT-1 UIDPLUS COMPRESS=DEFLATE
> 01 OK marko.vuko...@gmail.com Marko Vukovic authenticated (Success)
Marko Vukovic
shadebug
to determine if there is an IMAP server at an address and what
mailboxes it has access to. I don't ever expect gmail to be an issue
for me but if gmail has this issue then other servers might too so I
would like to know what it means and how to work round it.
EdD
Marko Vukovic
shadebug
working, is it a problem with the client or the server? The reason I'm
after a CLI method such as telnet or openssl is that it will be
readily available to me without having to install new software
anywhere. On all my addresses (that is, addresses I know the username
and password for) openssl works fine for logging int and browsing
mailbox structure and messages. That being said, it's entirely likely
that if GMail behaves in this strange manner then there may be many
others IMAP servers that do the same, in which case I would like to
know why and if anything can be done to access the mailbox structure
and messages in a more direct way than just using a mail client.
Two situations where this would be useful
Alice has her company email set up as separate mailboxes within one
overarching mailbox. Being able to see the structure would allow me to
work out what IMAP path to use to set up her email client properly.
Bob has an exotic mail set up that is meant to be accessed by webmail
but also has IMAP capability. When accessed through IMAP only one
folder appears whereas the webmail client shows many. Accessing the
mailbox structure directly would let me work out if it is a problem
with the client reading the information wrong or if the webmail is
accessing the mailbox from a different source.
If you know a better way round the issue I would be happy to hear it.
EdD
Marko Vukovic
2.2. Commands and Responses
An IMAP4rev1 connection consists of the establishment of a
client/server network connection, an initial greeting from the
server, and client/server interactions. These client/server
interactions consist of a client command, server data, and a server
completion result response.
All interactions transmitted by client and server are in the form of
lines, that is, strings that end with a CRLF. The protocol receiver
of an IMAP4rev1 client or server is either reading a line, or is
reading a sequence of octets with a known count followed by a line.
If you had then RTFM for s_client, you would have found the -crlf option:
shadebug
EdD
On Dec 18, 4:15 pm, Marko Vukovic <marko.vuko...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Again Ed, there is no issue. IMAP to Gmail works just fine using an IMAP
> capable client. I also don't see what your examples have to do with Gmail.
>
> If you'd read my previous post, I mentioned I suspected Gimap was probably
> expecting a line feed. If you want to talk IMAP, then you should at least
> consult the RFC <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501>. If you'd done that
pdiddy
Marko Vukovic
I'm trying to access gmail from RHEL 6 with below command and getting "unknown command" error, please let me know how to fix it...* OK Gimap ready for requests from 192.81.68.110 ip4if329360vdb.60login mye...@gmail.com mypasslogin BAD Unknown command ip4if329360vdb.60
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Marko