#Imap

E-mails that had been deleted for over 7 days were automatically removed from the IMAP server. E-mail date was ignored (ie the mail could have been from 2010; the actual time in “Trash” counted). This didn’t happen to other folders (Sent, Archive, Spam). This recently happened and hadn’t happened before.

I had to restore my trash folder from backups every 7 days (yay for rdiff-backup).

It took me a while to figure it out… The problem first appeared in October, right after several big changes:

Google changed their Mailbox names (from Google Mail, to Gmail) so here is the update from my previous php script I made a few years ago.

Edit: Gmail reverted back to the previous version (imap folders were “Google Mail”, changed to “Gmail” yesterday and today). To version v0.03 won’t work anymore. I’m guessing this was a temporary change to implement their exchange/push-support.

I’ve “updated” my previous php-app.

Since today I ended up getting this error:

Warning: imap_open(): Couldn't open stream {imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}[Google Mail]/Spam in /home/yeri/.gmail.php on line 30
Certificate failure for imap.gmail.com: unable to get local issuer certificate: /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc/CN=imap.gmail.com - Connection failed.

Simply searching this line:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/}$path"

And editing it to:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}$path"

Solves the problem.

This will ignore the Google certificate. Please do double check that imap.google.com really points to Google, and it’s not some kind of DNS issue.

I hate having unread mail. I hate having spam. And most of all, I hate spam that asks for attention.

When receiving spam in Gmail, you get the annoying bold Spam (12353434) with ‘12353434’ being the number of unread spam messages.

With the introduction of Gmail Labs I’d hope to see an “automaticly mark spam message as seen” feature, which, well, I haven’t found yet.

Being tired of all these increasing spam numbers, and my daily efforts to “select all unread + mark as read”, I ended up writing a small PHP file which connects to the Gmail (using IMAP, so I asume you’ll need IMAP enabled in your settings..) and marks all spam messages as read. Running this script locally with a curl or cron every X time will solve most of your problems, I hope.