Gmail provides pop3 access. You can set your gmail box for pop access using the settings link. They have detailed step by step guide for most of the clients. First I tried to access my gmail pop3 mail box using Net::pop3 module.(http://search.cpan.org)
No luck and I was wondering what is happening because the same program worked with other pop3 account. It took me a while to grasp that gmail is using pop3s (pop3 over SSL ) and net::pop3 has no SSL support ( I could be wrong , I did not dig very deep). But since gmail is such a nice and popular mbox there were plenty of links dealing with my issue.
No luck and I was wondering what is happening because the same program worked with other pop3 account. It took me a while to grasp that gmail is using pop3s (pop3 over SSL ) and net::pop3 has no SSL support ( I could be wrong , I did not dig very deep). But since gmail is such a nice and popular mbox there were plenty of links dealing with my issue.
My first try was to use GNU stunnel with Net::pop3 module. (http://www.stunnel.org) Stunnel can accept normal socket requests and forward as secure socket. I did stunnel install on windows XP. grab and install the windows MSI exe. Then copy the 2 DLLs (libeay and libssl) to your systems/win32 folder. And change the stunnel.conf file with accept and connect parameters. issue the command $stunnel --install to install stunnel as a windows service. Once stunnel is configured and running on your machine, you can use the localhost stunnel port for Net::Pop3. stunnel will then forward your requests over SSL.
schematics is perl Net::pop3 => normal => stunnel => SSL => gmail
schematics is perl Net::pop3 => normal => stunnel => SSL => gmail
However I could not get it to work. I tried creating and testing the localhost stunnel port from outlook but again no luck. maybe i was missing something with stunnel. I tried connecting using telnet and do a HELO but again no luck!!
I have a mac os x box at home. However before trying stunnel on that I just typed gmail cpan and out came GMail::Checker module. This module is a wrapper around gmail access. It took approx. 2 mins to run a sample program using Gmail::Checker on my mac os x box. ActiveState does not have Gmail::Checker module. So I really do not know how can I run my program on windows XP box. cygwin port of perl maybe ?
