
Using gmail with mutt (2016) - wheresvic1
https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt
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keyle
I tried this a while ago. And while it's fun, you realise most emails are
heavy in html/images/attachments and barely readable in full text form
anymore... :/

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funzis
I've been using mutt as my only email client for over 10 years now. You are
right that a lot of emails are HTML only, but you can use something like w3m
or lynx to render the HTML inside of mutt, and it is pretty rare that images
in emails actually matter. (Mostly they are company logos or other non-useful
crap...)

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
And even better: You avoid loading any external resources, which both avoids
the data leak, and prevents the sender from modifying the content of the
received email.

~~~
lstamour
Gmail relatively recently changed to intercept images and cache them all for
you, preventing the leak. But then, this is Google we’re talking about. I’m
sure there’s still a leak, maybe via AMP for Email. (Of course, hyperlinks are
also often used for tracking.)

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Only images? So, fonts can still be used to leak and manipulate?

~~~
lstamour
Well, no, custom web fonts generally aren’t supported by email clients, email
within Gmail is sanitized by default.

And I stand slightly corrected: by customizing email image URLs, you can
apparently track the first open, but not user details (IP address, device,
subsequent opens, etc.) [https://customer.io/blog/gmail-loading-
images.html](https://customer.io/blog/gmail-loading-images.html)

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donio
Another option is to keep a local mirror of your gmail, this can be one or two
way and with or without tags.

[https://github.com/gauteh/gmailieer](https://github.com/gauteh/gmailieer) and
[http://isync.sourceforge.net/](http://isync.sourceforge.net/) are tools I've
used for this. isync/mbsync is a high performance IMAP based syncing tool that
works well with for large mail spools. gmailieer uses the gmail API so it only
works with gmail but has good support for two-way tag syncing.

Some advantages of this approach are very fast local access and and the
ability to use your preferred local indexing and tagging tools (notmuch under
emacs in my case).

PS, I forgot that gmailieer is notmuch-only but I think some mutt users use
notmuch for indexing so it could still be useful.

~~~
alacombe
I've had a lot of bad luck with isync. Gmail keeps locking IMAPS access, even
if "insecure app access" is enabled. When trying to access the account through
thunderbird, it redirects to an online login page to authorize the app,
presumably through Google auth service to get an access token. I'm not sure it
can be worked-around without implementing the same logic in isync :-(

edit: using the trick in the page seems to have done the worked. It would seem
that my account access got locked during my last attempt. Time to run some
backup !

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lstamour
Interesting. Until this post, I hadn’t realized plain old username/password
Gmail authentication had been blocked, in most cases:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/6260879?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6260879?hl=en)

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sanatgersappa
life is too short.

