For a long time I used offlineimap to synchronize my emails between the email providers and my computer. Having access to all my emails offline on my computer is pretty handy. But after seeing the brutal efficiency advantage of mbsync over offlineimap, and having had delay issues with offlineimap myself, I decided to try mbsync out (the project is actually called isync, but the synchronization program is called mbsync).
The main issue I saw with using mbsync is that of the three different emails that I currently use, one of them had to use XOAUTH2 for authentication. This is natively supported by offlineimap but not by mbsync.
Installation
The first step of course was to install isync/mbsync.
I then installed a SASL plugin for the XOAUTH2 mechanism, which in Arch Linux is packaged in AUR as cyrus-sasl-xoauth2-git.
For mbsync to authenticate through XOAUTH2, a program is needed to use the account credentials to obtain the current token. For this I installed a python package called oauth2token which can be installed with pip, or directly from AUR. Thanks to VannTen for creating this package and also for helping me solve some issues with setting up mbsync with XOAUTH2!
Note: When I originally installed mbsync, there was an issue with using it with XOAUTH2. At the time of this writing though it was already fixed in version 1.3.2.
Configuration
To configure oauth2token I followed the instructions in the README, which
consist of basically creating two json files with the account information
(client_id and client_secret should be setup with the provider, in my
case Gmail) in a specific directory, executing oauth2create <provider>
<account> and logging into the email account on the browser.
Having set up oauth2token, configuring mbsync to use it was pretty simple. I
just added PassCmd "oauth2get <provider> <account>" in the IMAPAccount
section of my .mbsyncrc, obviously changing <provider> and <account>
for the values I configured in oauth2token. In my case it wasn't necessary to
specify the authentication mechanism in that same section with AuthMechs
XOAUTH2, since XOAUTH2 is considered the safest mechanism installed, so it is
the default. Rather I needed to use AuthMechs PLAIN in the IMAPAccount
section of the other accounts that I didn't want to use XOAUTH2 with.
Finally, I ran mbsync for the account that I configured XOAUTH2 with ("dac").
By making the output verbose (-V), it can be seen that it authenticated
using XOAUTH2 and everything worked as expected:
[nfraprado@ArchWay ~]$ mbsync -V dac Reading configuration file /home/nfraprado/.mbsyncrc C: 0/1 B: 0/0 M: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 S: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 Channel dac Opening master store dac-remote... Resolving imap.gmail.com... ok Connecting to imap.gmail.com ([2800:3f0:4003:c02::6c]:993)... Opening slave store dac-local... Connection is now encrypted Logging in... Authenticating with SASL mechanism XOAUTH2... C: 0/1 B: 0/5 M: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 S: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 Opening master box INBOX... Opening slave box INBOX... Maildir notice: no UIDVALIDITY, creating new. Loading master... master: 0 messages, 0 recent Loading slave... slave: 0 messages, 0 recent Synchronizing... C: 0/1 B: 1/5 M: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 S: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 [ ... ] Opening master box _Sent... Opening slave box _Sent... Creating slave _Sent... Maildir notice: no UIDVALIDITY, creating new. Loading master... Loading slave... slave: 0 messages, 0 recent master: 92 messages, 0 recent Synchronizing... C: 1/1 B: 5/5 M: +0/0 *0/0 #0/0 S: +367/367 *0/0 #0/0