How do I setup Alpine to connect my Gmail account using IMAP?

Question

I am using FreeBSD 8.1 and just installed Alpine email client. I wonder if anybody knows how to setup Alpine to get mail from a Gmail account using IMAP.

Answer 1

For clarity, I'm just going to give the directions in terms of what you should add to .pinerc. You can also set all of these setting using the configuration interface if you wish.

To get your mail via IMAP:

inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}

Include this to make sure you have access to all of the various gmail folders:

folder-collections=Gmail {imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com}[]

I find this useful to mimic "archiving":

default-saved-msg-folder=[Gmail]/All Mail

To send mail via gmail, you need this in .pinerc:

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user=username@gmail.com

Also, I find that these two settings improve performance a lot:

 rsh-open-timeout=0
 disable-these-authenticators=GSSAPI

If you want alpine to remember your password for you, you can run this command in your home directory:

 touch .pine-passfile

The first time you use alpine after running this command, you will be asked whether you want to save your password for later use each time you enter one.