On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 08:59 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:

> Google is actively trying to discourage IMAP use. I have heard reports that
> they deliberately have it fail randomly to aid in this.

What evidence do you have for this?

I didn't say I had any hard evidence, I said "I have heard reports". I am not accusing Google of any criminal activity here. 

Google *Is* trying to discourage use of IMAP. They want everyone to use their API's (via the web interface or a Gmail-specific app). Their tech support people have told us this much. Whether they are actually causing failures to discourage IMAP use is, of course, pure speculation. All I can say there is that there are people who believe they are doing this based on their own tests. Anecdotal evidence only. Take it for what it's worth.
 



The problem being reported (and which I have also seen) is not with
IMAP but with CalDav.

Sorry, that's my bad for misreading the original post. So this side thread is largely irrelevant to the OP.
 
 See https
://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1346228

Thank you for that; I learned something useful by reading through that. I was curious because I have what may be a related issue in that, periodically, Evolution starts putting up popup windows for every *#(@(*! Google calendar in my list, asking for the password. I wish I knew how to turn that off. I don't use Evolution to access my calendars, I only use it for IMAP. Unfortunately the one thing Google still doesn't provide is a decent interface to PGP for reading encrypted e-mail; I still have to use IMAP for that. This is annoying enough to make me consider trying other IMAP clients, but Evolution does have a nice easy to use interface for reading and sending PGP-encrypted mail.

--Greg