Google officially announces OAuth support for IMAP/SMTP Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Google officially announces OAuth support for IMAP/SMTP Gmail

googlecode.blogspot.com

108 pointscsallen10 comments

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Sweet! I've just updated my PHP example to work with these specs:

http://web.mailana.com/labs/handmadeimap/gmailoauthexample/i...

http://github.com/petewarden/handmadeimap

There's now also official code in several languages available at http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/code.html

Congrats to Eric Sachs and the rest of the team for getting this out sooner than expected.

Is there a throttling component to this? I seem to recall that some people used to encounter problems when trying to use a script to access GMail (for backups). I don't see any API limits offhand.

Gmail only allows 10 simultaneous IMAP connections to your Gmail account (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...), and that isn't changing with this new OAuth news.

And based on my experience working on Syphir (https://www.syphir.com), chances are you won't run into any IMAP throttling problems based the frequency of your access. Syphir makes a few IMAP calls per user per incoming email, and we generally haven't run into any problems.

This is great news. I blogged about this back in October - glad to see Google have taken this issue on.

http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2009/10/my-gmail-password-scares...

It will be interesting to see how successful adoption of IMAP-via-OAuth will be.

It won't be long before all protocols would be tunneled over the stateless and rock-solid HTTP protocol which works well across different networks, NATs, behind firewall and on different devices.

Is this what Gabor Cselle has been working on since moving to Google?

My guess is that this feature was well on the way to completion when Gabor Ceselle rejoined Google a month ago. One month is a short time to develop and launch a feature that spans two teams (user accounts, mail) at a big company like Google.

Yes, I would doubt that this was his idea, but I'm wondering whether this is what he's working on mainly.

[redacted till I finish reading what I should have read in first place]

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