Wouldn’t it be great if you could access your Gmail in Apple Mail over IMAP? A long time ago I posted about a guy who claimed he had this working, but nothing more was ever heard about it.

Now, it seems that you can, if you know a bit of Perl and are not in a hurry.

Julio Vidal has discovered a Perl module which does exactly that.

He got it working with Mail although it was slow.

I won’t pretend to understand a fifth of what he writes, but it sounds promising:

For your pleasure, it is now in pkgsrc as mail/p5-GMail-IMAPD alongside a patch to accommodate a change in GMail’s login protocol. There is also the programmatic interface to the web service used by the former in mail/p5-Mail-Webmail-Gmail , but be aware that the former includes a somewhat obsolete copy of the latter due to non-official modifications.

If some red-hot Perl coder passes by, takes an interest in this and is able to package it up in a way that normal people like me can understand and use, I’d love to hear about it.