Gmail and Claws

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 22:22:38 +0300
shlomo solomon <shlomo.solomon at gmail.com> wrote:

> Google/Gmail has decided to drive me crazy and I hope someone can
> help.
> 
> Some background:
> 1 - my gmail address is shlomo.solomon at gmail.com
> 2 - all my mail is forwarded to my domain shlomo at the-solomons.net
> 3 - For MANY years, I've used Claws mail (and before that KMail) as my
> client because I HATE webmail in general and Gmail specifically.
> 4 - Claws accesses my mail over POP3 and SMTP
> 5 - to allow this, I have Gmail set up to allow POP access and my
> Google account set up to allow "Less secure app access" (Google-speak
> for anything not provided or controlled by Google).
> 6 - This setup has worked for at least 20 years and I've made no
> recent changes so there's no OBVIOUS reason for it not to work now.
> 
> BUT, in the past few weeks, Gmail has randomly refused to let Claws
> access my mail. Sometimes this lasts for a short time and sometimes
> for hours or even a day or more.
> 
> The Claws log shows:
> 
> * Account 'GMail': Connecting to POP3 server: pop.gmail.com:995...
> [21:49:25] POP< +OK Gpop ready for requests from 89.237.110.180
> s20mb165349719wra
> [21:49:25] POP> USER shlomo.solomon at gmail.com
> [21:49:25] POP< +OK send PASS
> [21:49:25] POP> PASS ********
> [21:49:25] POP< -ERR [AUTH] Web login required:
> https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78754
> *** error occurred on authentication
> *** Authentication failed.

Hmmm, why require a **WEB** login? Why not just a POP login?

[snip]

> And as I wrote above, after a while, the problem solves itself.

It's intermittent. This makes things even more difficult.

> 
> And one more thing - I have additional Gmail accounts with the same
> setup and Gmail DOES allow Claws mail access, while denying access to
> my main account. So that's also weird.

I'd start by exploiting the differences between this one and the Gmail
accounts that never display this symptom. Do you access it differently?
Is the account set up differently on the Google side? Just keep trying
to exploit the differences.

> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It's easy to access email by IMAP instead of POP. That may or may not
fix it, but either way, it gives you some info.

I don't know how you're asking Gmail for your email, but if your email
client is doing the asking, this could be a problem in your email
client or its setup.  Every 3 minutes I have fetchmail grab my Gmail
mail (along with my Troubleshooters.Com mail and Earthlink and who
knows what else). Every once in a while the fetchmail log shows a
failure, but not enough to be a problem. You might try having fetchmail
do the fetching, send it straight to procmail to sort into folders for
your email client (or if you do it like I do, to your local Dovecot
server.)

All email clients suck. I use Claws-Mail. Claws sucks less than most,
but it still sucks. I try to move as much computation as possible out of
the email client. Dovecot works perfectly, month after month, year
after year. Via IMAP, I use Claws Mail as a window into my Dovecot
folders.

SteveT

Steve Litt
March 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb