Lichen and GMail's IMAP

Requirements

The subversion revision r220 contains fixes that allow GMail's IMAP server to work with Lichen. This only affected sending emails with Lichen and GMail.

Settings

In lichen-config.php, the following settings need to be set.

$SMTP_SERVER  = "smtp.gmail.com";
$SMTP_PORT    = 465;
$SMTP_USE_SSL = true;
$SMTP_AUTH    = true;
$SMTP_DOMAIN  = "gmail.com";

$IMAP_SERVER  = "imap.gmail.com";
$SPECIAL_FOLDERS['inbox']  = "INBOX";
$SPECIAL_FOLDERS['sent']   = "[Gmail]/Sent Mail";
$SPECIAL_FOLDERS['drafts'] = "[Gmail]/Drafts";
$SPECIAL_FOLDERS['trash']  = "[Gmail]/Trash";

Login

To login, you use your full gmail email address and password. So the username is <username>@gmail.com.

You will probably need to edit your identity to make the email address correct.

Notes

It is currently really, really slow. Using it through an IMAP proxy seemed to make little difference in the speed. I believe the issue with the speed to be something to do with GMail limiting the number of repeated connections; some connections seem to take 10 seconds to authenticate or return results.

Lichen's client side caching will help somewhat, but this is still limited in how much assistance it gives.