What do Google Apps, IMAP, the iPhone and Captcha have in common?

Posted by Luke Bayes Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:38:00 GMT

Together, they can save and waste an amazing amount of time!

I finally broke down today and got an iPhone. Thanks to the fanboys and marketing hype, it is still embarrassing to break out in public, much less write about! But I just feel compelled to get this out there in case I need it again and in case it helps someone else.

Basically, I wanted to get the iPhone email client to pull down my Google Apps hosted email. It seemed like the best way to do this was to set up IMAP.

I started this process by opening my desktop email client in the browser (which is essentially gmail, but slightly different for the google app premium edition), and followed the instructions found here.

Your IMAP server wants to alert you to the following: Invalid
credentials (Failure)

After getting frustrated that there is no support for copy and paste in the iPhone and getting really tired of entering minor variations of my credentials, I finally decided to try it out using the desktop mail client on OS X.

Same problem there.

Long story short, it turns out there is some issue that has to do with Google Apps, IMAP and Captcha coming together in a perfect storm of hidden documentation and not-so-helpful error messages.

After some searches in a variety of Google App and Gmail discussion groups didn’t result in anything helpful, I finally decided to get down to the Google Apps premium customer support. This led me down the rabbit hole that finally led to the answer I was looking for.

Can’t log into your IMAP server?

https://www.google.com/a/[your domain].com/UnlockCaptcha

There is also a handy tidbit on this page related to the url for the imap and smtp servers.

There is another page in the documentation that looks very similar, but fails to mention that the host names can be either:

OR

Hope this helps shave some time off of someone’s troubles!

Oh, and one more thing, during my searches, I stumbled over this helpful post on how to avoid creating duplicate folders/labels in your web client.