Tag: Gmail

I’ve got way too many email addresses. Free email accounts opened up as a teenager that I don’t want to get rid of because they hold some strange nostalgic value. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo…I’ve even got an account with RocketMail, which eventually became Yahoo! Mail.

So consolidation is my other option.  I’m using Google Apps for Domains which essentially gives me Gmail on my own domain.  Most of the free email services have some mechanism which I can use to forward to my Gmail account, but Yahoo! requires their paid service.  No fun.

If I was using a desktop email client I could just implement YPOPs! or FreePOPs. But I’m not.

Linux to the rescue! Using Exim and FetchYahoo I can now periodically check my Yahoo! Mail accounts and redirect them to my Gmail account. FetchYahoo is great because it provides the mechanism to forward emails to another email address; the products mentioned about don’t appear to have this feature.

Here’s how I did it, using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

Reconfigure Exim4 to use Gmail SMTP (Note: POP must be enabled in your Gmail settings). I used the instructions I found on TechSutra, which I’m not going to reproduce here because I’m lazy.

Remember to comment out or remove any other smarthost defined with “domains = ! +local_domains” as well as any other authenticators where “public_name = LOGIN”. These were both defined for me and I originally missed these steps.

Ensure that Exim4 is working. See step 3 from TechSutra’s instructions.

Download and install FetchYahoo (2.13.3 as of this writing). Alternatively, install from the repos (it’s an older version though):

sudo apt-get install fetchyahoo

Test FetchYahoo. Replace <username> and <password> with your, well, username and password.

fetchyahoo --mailhost=localhost --username=<username>@yahoo.com \
--password=<password> --onlylistmessages

You should see a list of the emails in your inbox. If it bombs out, you might try logging into your Yahoo! Mail and changing the interface from Classic to New and vice-versa.

Try forwarding to Gmail using FetchYahoo. You can limit the number of emails it fetches by using –maxmessages=N where N is the maximum number of messages to grab, but I only had a handful of emails in my inbox at the time.  Once the emails are processed, they’ll end up in the Trash, so if there are problems, you can just move them back to the inbox and try again.

fetchyahoo --sendto=<username>@gmail.com --mailhost=localhost \
--username=<username>@yahoo.com --password=<password>

You should see something like the following:

Only forwarding e-mail, local delivery turned off.
Logging in securely via SSL as <username>@yahoo.com on Wed Apr 15 00:04:15 2009
Country code : us    FetchYahoo! Version: 2.13.3
Successfully logged in as <username>@yahoo.com.
Marking messages read on the server

Fetching mail from folder: Inbox
Getting Message ID(s) for message(s) 1 - 5.
Got 5 Message IDs
._._.__.5
Finished downloading 5 messages.
5 message(s) have been deleted.

You can monitor the Exim4 logfile to see if the emails are being sent properly:

tail -f /var/log/exim/mainlog

Check your Gmail account for the forwarded emails. Now the only glitch I’m having here is that forwarded emails seem to be coming into All Mail rather than Inbox and are already marked as read.  If anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know.

If all is well at this point, then congratulations! If all is not well, then I don’t know what to tell you, slick. It worked for me.

Create FetchYahoo configuration file. FetchYahoo allows for an /etc/fetchyahoorc file or ~/.fetchyahoorc file rather than passing all the options via the command line. From the FetchYahoo source folder, copy fetchyahoorc to your home directory:

cp fetchyahoorc ~/.fetchyahoorc

Then edit the file, substituting your own values as applicable.  The most important values are:

username = yahoo-user-name@yahoo.com
password = yahoo-password
use-forward = 1
mail-host = localhost
send-to = gmail-user-name@gmail.com

If you’d rather store a hashed password than the plaintext, you can run

fetchyahoo --md5hex

which will give you a md5 hash of your password suitable for storing in the configuration file.

Save and test the config file by running fetchyahoo with no parameters.

Schedule to run periodically via cron or use the daemon mode. I’m using cron because I’ll probably only check these accounts every few days and I don’t need the process just hanging around in the meantime.  The –repeat-interval=N command line parameter (or just repeat-interval = N in the config file) is all you need to run the process as a daemon.

And that’s it!  So until the Yahoo! folks decide to come around and allow for POP3 access or some other mechanism to get email out from their stronghold, this is what I’ll use to get my coveted bits of spam to Gmail.

Update: The original procedure described above ended up dropping forwarded emails from Yahoo into the All Mail folder rather than the Inbox due to the fact that I was sending to and from the same Gmail account.  Since I implemented this procedure using Google Apps for Domains, I simply created a generic account from which I am sending emails, and all is now well with the world.

Resources:

• Configuring exim4 in Ubuntu to use GMail for SMTP

• FetchYahoo INSTALL document

• Gmail: Enabling POP