Google threatens cutoff of gmail access on 5/30/2022

Thanks, I looked at google a little and it appears this is what they want. I don't know how effective this is as a form of two factor authentication but if it works, it works. Basically you are telling google that you trust the Mac gmail client when you setup the account. I have been using Mac mail and gmail for a very long time and have a large number of emails in it that I don't want to lose, so I will delete and readd my account as suggested after I export all my emails as a backup. I'll reply again after this proves to be the solution.

So do I! I have setup a yahoo account that accesses my gmail account and another one to act as a backup id. Imap is a strange new world for me and I miss the old pop protocol, but it sure is flexible. BTW the yahoo web client is really quite good. It's very fast too, much faster than the gmail web client.

Thanks muguy. That basically worked. At first I was upset because it said all the email would be deleted from the mail ap. It's true but being IMAP it readily loads them back in. Also before creating the new google account for mail you need to reboot. When I tried w/o rebooting it opened a browser window but did not load anything in it. After rebooting the window contains a field for the google verification code which the texted me. Then the mail app fired up and is in the process of downloading the thousands of emails in my inbox. I think I got this way because I've had my gmail account since gmail was created, log before anyone heard of google authentication, and I just slipped through the cracks because I was avoiding using google except for email.

I don't know if the email protocol has anything to do with this threatened cutoff message. What I did was simply delete the old email app and install it again as suggested by leno77 above. During the re-installation you'll be prompted to open a browser and indicate that you trust the email app. I think this is just a formal procedure google added sometime after I started using gmail. I don't know if it has anything to do with the email protocol or not but to be safe I first saved my emails simply by copying the inbox which resides in the IMAP server to a local email directory.

I converted from pop protocol years ago. The old protocol had some advantages as mail stayed in the pop server even if it was deleted on my computer by mistake. I found that useful on more than one occasion when I accidentally deleted an important email. But if you want to keep your mail on your local computer IMAP allows you to do that by simply by copying the emails to a local directory. I believe your assumption: "drawback with IMAP vs POP is that you have to have the identical sub folder structure, and moving around messages on your mac moves them on the google server. which is what I did not want." is actually incorrect. The Apple mail app allows you to create a directory structure under "On My Mac" which is not in the IMAP server.

You might be right jszrules. My first gmail account used pop but that was before 2-factor authentication during setup so I can't verify your assumption. if II were you I'd convert to IMAP. The big difference for me is when you delete an email, it's gone on the server too. If you want to keep notes in directories on your computer you can do that too but emails and directories on the server are there for all your computers to see equally.

Actually it doesn't take as long as you might think as the body of each email stays on the server until you open it or copy it to a local folder. I used to have 20K+ emails on the server and it took a while but didn't have much of an impact on my computer and I was able to use the mail client while this was going on.