How can I use my Gmail contacts within Alpine/pine?
How to use the Gmail contacts within Alpine/pine
address-bookalpine-mailemailgmailgmail-contacts
Related Solutions
As far as I know if you don't have a Google Apps account, there is no active bidirectional sync. You could just set up an imap Gmail account in Windows Mail, but there's no (official) tool to sync the changes you make locally back to Gmail.
You refer to the Outlook post, but I think I they concluded something the same there.
I recommended using GcalDaemon there, but I think it only gives you access to your addressbook.
From Configuring Alpine:
Start by going to the "Setup Configuration" screen (M S C) and find the Folder Preferences section. Under this section, set enable-incoming-folders and restart alpine for the change to take effect. Now go to your Incoming Message Folders (F Incoming-Folders), but don't open your INBOX folder.
Now comes the fun part.
Since you want to add a new folder, type A. You'll be presented with a command-line asking for the "Name of server to contain added folder" and four options below that. We're interested in the options. Since you're going to be pulling mail off of a remote pop3 server, you want to configure a mail drop, which is the last option, thus press Ctrl W. You'll now be asked for the name of the mail drop server (the server you're pulling the mail off of). Enter the server (and port number if you desire), your username (which may or may not include part of the server address), and pop3. When done, you should have something that looks like the following:
pop.server.tld:port/user=username@server.tld/pop3If you are using a secure connection, you will need to add two things to the entry. First, append ssl to the end. When that is done (and assuming you don't want, or are having difficulties setting up, certificate validation), add novalidate-cert just after the mail drop server. Once you are done, you should have something that resembles the following:
pop.server.tld:port/novalidate-cert/user=username@server.tld/pop3/sslNow hit Enter. You'll now be asked for the folder you want to copy the mail from; answer: Inbox.
Next: "Name of server to contain destination folder". Leave this blank, and continue on.
Now for the "Folder to copy mail to". You can name this anything you want, but I generally use the user name of whatever email account I'm setting the mail drop up for.
And I do the same as above for the "Nickname for folder "username"".
And now you have a brand new mail drop folder. To set up more, just repeat as needed.
Alpine e-mail setup also has Alpine setup instructions, including how to set up Gmail using POP3 (including pictures):
This is an example of using POP3 from Gmail. You will need to enable POP3 from your Gmail account under Settings→Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
To create a new incoming folder for POP, use Main Menu→Folder List→Incoming-Folders→Add.
It will prompt to ask you the Name of server to contain added folder:
Name of server to contain added folder: pop.gmail.com:995/novalidate-cert/user=username@gmail.com/pop3/sslIt will then prompt to ask for the 'Folder on 'pop.gmail.com…" to add:
Folder on "pop.gmail.com.." to add: INBOXFill in a nickname:
Nickname for folder "INBOX" : INBOX at gmail.comIt will then connect to gmail server and will prompt for the username@gmail.com password. Enter it, and the INBOX will open.
Best Answer
An alternate way of importing your Google contacts is using pull_contacts.py.
This script will:
So, to add all of your Google contacts to the addressbook, simply:
The main advantage of this method over the one described by DaveParillo is the added support for non-latin1 characters. If you're like me and have a lot of people with accented letters in their names, this script is a God-send -- you won't have to go through the list manually replacing ? with the right latin1 letter.
Note that the script requires the GData libraries.