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fetchmail version 6.4.39 stopped working with Gmail

One day I had fetchmail version 6.4.39 stopped working with Gmail saying in log:

fetchmail: Authorization failure on [email protected]
fetchmail: For help, see http://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-FAQ.html#R15
fetchmail: Query status=3 (AUTHFAIL)

That FAQ page wasn't very useful - no thoughts for me to dig further.

In the ~/.fetchmailrc config file I had this string, which was working fine for many years:

poll pop.gmail.com protocol pop3 username '[email protected]' password 'VerySecurePsw0rt' ssl

At the same time I was still able to login successfully to my google account in browser using that credentials from ~/.fetchmailrc. That was pretty wierd, considering I didn't change anything in configs and in my google account. Also, I have double-checked Gmail settings and confirmed that still have "Status: POP is enabled" there.

After some research I found very nice detailed article which says:

App passwords.

It seems like there’s a possibility to generate a 16-digit password, which is specific to an app. So at least in theory, this app password could be given to Fetchmail in order to perform a regular login.

So, I decided to try it considering pretty "low price" for such feature - I just had to enable 2FA for my Google account.

After 2FA has been activated I was able to see the new functionality named "App passwords", which is available under URL https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords There I created a new password exclusively for fetchmail and pasted it to the ~/.fetchmailrc config instead of main google account password that was there before. And miracle happened! Fetchmail started to fetch my mail from gmail servers as before.

Posted in *nix.

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