From: Greg Ferguson <8si.greg@...>
Date: 2009-08-24T00:31:18+09:00
Subject: Re: retrieving Yahoo mail with Net::IMAP

From my own experiments with Yahoo and a lot of investigation, I found 
that they only allow IMAP to mobile devices. There's a couple services 
that enable that access to them, but Yahoo doesn't seem to have it 
directly. They're probably sniffing some client signature or allowed 
hosts that act as front-ends and refusing any that are not in their 
"privileged party" list.

As others said, the Yahoo Pro service allows IMAP. For my use I couldn't 
require that for users so I gave up.

gmail does have IMAP. Their IMAP is slower than using their RSS 
(actually ATOM) to check the mail queue, so I suggest having a client 
that makes the RSS request, then another that falls back to IMAP to 
manage the queue or retrieve individual messages. Here's a jumping-off 
point if you want to try the RSS "thang":

http://www.forevergeek.com/2004/10/gmail_rss_feed/

Parsing the feed is easy enough using Hpricot (and probably Nokogiri). I 
don't remember if they got fancy with namespaces, which can make life 
hell when dealing with arbitrary feeds, but even if they do, since 
you're only interested in gmail you can work something up specific to 
them easily.

It also seemed like Google's IMAP servers didn't implement the full 
spec. Maybe that's because their system wasn't designed for mail storage 
from day one?

Greg
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