Gmail on SeaMonkey

And Other Mail Clients Needing Manual Settings

As part of checking out the current status of SeaMonkey, I wanted to see if its email client can still connect to Gmail after the move to OAuth2. And it turns out it can!

I had to create a placeholder account first, then edit the config manually, because SeaMonkey doesn’t come with presets like newer email programs do.

And then I had to copy over my settings from the much more modern Thunderbird, because Gmail’s documentation no longer tells you which servers to use, assuming anything that supports OAuth2 is also going to have presets for Google. Once I did that, it popped up a login page when I told it to retrieve new mail.

• IMAP pointing to imap.gmail.com
• SMTP pointing to smtp.gmail.com
• SSL/TLS as connection security
• OAuth2 as authentication
• Your full email address as the username

Once I had those set up, the first time I told it to retrieve mail for the account it opened up a window with the Google sign-in page.

(If you’ve disabled cookies, you’ll need to turn them back on while you sign in.)

I expect the same technique should work for other providers using OAuth2 like Outlook and Yahoo. And I’d expect the same settings should work on other email clients that support OAuth2 but don’t autoconfigure Gmail.

I haven’t found a way to sync address books or calendars with SeaMonkey, though you can theoretically subscribe to a calendar.