Check Google's GMail via Apple's Mail.app

Oct 05, '04 10:06:00AM

Contributed by: bluehz

Using this technique, you can download and read your Gmail account mail in your GUI-based mail client. This article is written for Apple's Mail.app, but it is basically the same for all mail clients once you get the POP3 proxy software installed.

REQUIREMENTS

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL FREEPOPS

Download FreePOPS for OS X from the OS X Downloads page. There are packages available for Panther and Jaguar. These are standard OS X style installer packages that will install a single directory named "FreePOPs" into your applications directory.

Since this is basically a command-line binary and has no GUI, and also because I wanted it to be accesible as a startup item, I decided to move the FreePOPs directory to a more suitable location -- /usr/local/. You can do this manually after running the installer package, or you can use something like Pacifist to extract the package contents directly into /usr/local/.

START THE FREEPOPS SERVER DEAMON

To start the server, you will need to use the Terminal and change directories (cd) to the FreePOPs directory (wherever you installed it):.

cd /usr/local/bin/FreePOPs
There really is no configuration required, so you can just issue the following command to start the server and put it in the background:
sudo ./freepopsd -p 110 -d
You should now be able to check your processes and see the freepopsd process running:
ps ax | grep freepopsd
CONFIGURE MAIL CLIENT (MAIL.APP)

Open Mail.app -> Preferences, and create a new account. For the details use: You should now be able to check your gmail account within Mail.app.

NOTES: (OPTIONAL) FREEPOPS STARTUP ITEM:

If you wish to have the freepops server daemon startup each time you reboot then follow the procedure below:

Create the following directory and files (as root):
/Library/StartupItems/freepops
/Library/StartupItems/freepops/freepops
/Library/StartupItems/StartupParameters.plist
Change permissions to executable on both freepopsd and StartupParameters.plist:
chmod 755 /Library/StartupItems/freepops/*
The structure should look something like this when done:
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     admin         136 Sep 29 01:55 .
drwxrwxr-x   13 root     admin         442 Sep 29 01:22 ..
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     admin         530 Sep 29 13:01 StartupParameters.plist
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     admin         523 Sep 29 13:25 freepopsd
Open the file /Library -> StartupItems -> freepops -> freepops, and paste in the following:
#!/bin/sh

##
# FreePOPs Server
##

## Note this is geared towards an installation of freepops in
## /usr/local/freepops. If you installed in some other location,
## change the 'base' line below to reflect the install directory:

base=/usr/local/FreePOPs
. /etc/rc.common

StartService ()
{
	ConsoleMessage "Starting FreePOPs Server..."
	#/usr/local/FreePOPs/src/freepopsd -w -l /var/log/freepops.log -p 110 -d
	cd $base
	/usr/local/FreePOPs/freepopsd -p 110 -d
}

StopService ()
{
    if [ -f "/var/run/freepopsd.pid" ]; then
	    ConsoleMessage "Stopping FreePOPs Server..."
	    PID=`cat /var/run/freepopsd.pid`
		kill -9 $PID
	fi
}

RestartService ()
{
	StopService
	StartService
}

RunService "$1"
Open the file /Library -> StartupItems -> StartupParameters.plist, and paste in the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Description</key>
	<string>FreePOPs Server</string>
	<key>OrderPreference</key>
	<string>Late</string>
	<key>Provides</key>
	<array>
		<string>freepops</string>
	</array>
	<key>Requires</key>
	<array>
		<string>Resolver</string>
	</array>
	<key>Uses</key>
	<array>
		<string>Disks</string>
		<string>Network</string>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>
To start the server for the first time manually, you can issue the command:
sudo SystemStarter start freepops
STARTUPITEM NOTES:

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