[Emacspeak] Re: Loss of Access to Gmail - Text Mode

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

While I can sympathise with your situation, I think it is also important
to recognise that Google and gmail in particular, is first and foremost
a web based company. The whole gmail ecosystem was designed and
implemented as a web based email solution. The fact you can access it
with imap and smtp is really just incidental and was never a significant
feature from the Google perspective. In fact, I'm pretty sure Google
would disable imap permanently if they could.  

While you might feel there is a good sized community of users who never
use a Javascript enabled browser or who never login to Google via the
web, I suspect, from a Google perspective, it isn't a significant number
at all. In fact, I suspect from the Google perspective, their view is
that proportionateley, maintaining imap access uses more resources for
the number of users than the web interface and the number of users who
refuse to run javascript is so small, they really don't care if they
loose their patronage.  

Reality is, if you want an email service which is not oriented towards
web based interfaces, don't select a web oriented service provider.
There is no hope of moving Google away from their web first orientation
and I suspect, it will get even worse as time progresses. There are also
signs that the 'free ride' we have all had with regards to many services
is coming to an end. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we don't need to
move to a paid email service in the next decade or so (assuming email
doesn't go the way of NNTP and other protocols seldom used anymore - who
remembers gopher!). 

"D.J.J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea(a)arrl.net> writes:

> Jim Green just called me, he now again has access to his email using imap and pop, but the problem is that he cannot log in to a
> web browser to gmail,
> and since he never has done so ever, the way of regaining access to his account must be from a logged in account.
>
> Google thinks we all access gmail through a web page not an imap server.
>
> There is a good sized community of people who have never logged into google with a browser, in fact most of my browsers like
> elinks and links and w3m don't log in to google.com at all.  It says I have to use a browser with javascript.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> David