Any progress on porting gmail (or any email) to our 68K Macs?

[mraroid]

Hi folks....

 

I have a Color Classic Mystic.  I am using a LC 575 board, the 640 X 480 mod, and running a CF card for a hard drive. I am running 8.1 as well as 7.6. I have a network card installed and it goes directly to my modern Linksys WiFi router via ethernet.  I can pull up a browser and surf old time web pages that support http (but not https) and no fancy stuff.  May hobbyists like some of us, are running web pages that we can access and they display perfectly.  Here is an example:

 

https://obsolete.macfixer.com/vintage-software/

 

I still have this fantasy that someone will find a way so that I can read and respond to my gmail on my Mystic.  A few years ago here, someone was developing a raspberry pi, and some software to do this.  It was sort of working, but as I understand it, it was never finished.    I may have missed other attempts.

 

Is anyone working on this?  Or has someone found a solution? 

 

I enjoy the speed of my Mystic and do use it often.  If I could get email working on it, it would work well for a daily driver for me.

 

Anyone have any suggestions, or pointers to web sites for more info on this issue?

 

Thanks so much,

 

mraroid

 

 

 

 

[Cory5412]

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing straightforward right now. It would require you either run your own server to rehost your mail, use an SSH client and a text-mode email client on a modern computer or run some SSL bridges. I believe @BacioiuC was working on this but I forgot where he got.

 

In addition, you'd need to be receiving mail simple enough for a version for web browser to display, so modern email that expects you to be looking at your mail in Chrome/Chredge won't work well or look good.

 

I've set up a vintage-compatible server at http://vtools.68kmla.org/ and my intent was to provide no-SSL vintage compatible email through it, as sort of a "hey look" thing, but I haven't migrated to 10.4 server and ASIP6 handles email very poorly at this point, so it's currently disabled.

[BacioiuC]

E-mail works and can be actively used, sadly not gmail as it requires HTTPS by default. However, I have it working via a combination of MailDrop (client) + Mail Baton (acts as a local SMTP redirection server) since a lot of early mail clients defaulted to a single SMTP port.

 

But let me repeat, SSL only mail services will not work unless you setup a proxy locally which, from all my attempts so far, I never managed to achieve. You can get around this by getting a custom domain and host from a service that offers e-mail and SSL-less ways of connecting to it (eg. namecheap). You can then re-direct gmail mail to the private domain and have it accessible on your 68K email client.

 

It's a lot to setup but kinda worth it. I like getting e-mails on my SE/30. 

[Dog Cow]

I'm working on a brand-new email client called Aurora that will work on a Mac 128K or better. The first version will have POP3 + SMTP, and I plan to do IMAP for the next version.

[karrots]

Gmail supports IMAP4 you could use Eudora.

[mraroid]

Thanks everyone for the reports.   I used Eudora for any years. I may still have the original disks for several versions.

Very interested in your work Dog Cow.  Please keep us posted.

 

mraroid

 

 

[Cory5412]

On 4/8/2021 at 2:09 AM, karrots said:

Gmail supports IMAP4 you could use Eudora.

 

Will any Eudora versions for classic mac connect or would you still need to pipe it through an SSL stripping tunnel? Most 8/9 era software (some of which works fine in system 7, like eudora and netscape4/ie-oe4) support imap, but have bad or no SSL support.)