Gmail IMAP no longer working for iOS

TidBITS Talk
1

On about 7th June, my normal google mail account stopped working in iOS Mail on both my iPhone and iPad. (The error message I get is ‘Cannot Get Mail / No password provided for / Please go to Mail Account Settings and enter a password’).

Note that the account was added using the Add Account / Other option (rather than Add Account / Google) to access email via iMap. Why? Because this seems to be the only way to use alias email addresses with gmail.

Back to the problem - I thought it might be related to iOS 15.5 (which I had just recently updated to) but I think it actually has to do with Google disabling the ‘Less secure apps’ option which officially became unsupported on 30th May.

Can anyone confirm this is the case? If so, has anyone got Gmail working with iOS Mail via iMap?

My workaround at this point has been to download the Gmail app which does allow use of alias email addresses (though doesn’t seem to allow a default to be specified). However I really don’t want to have to use multiple mail clients on my devices and the Gmail app is quite rudimentary in its settings.

2

See this thread from a few days ago:

Apple Mail and Gmail not authenticating

3

My gmail account is working fine with Mail. I had a similar problem with a different account and ended up removing and adding it back in on my iphone. That worked. Once I did that on my phone it worked fine on my ipads.

4

Yep, have tried deleting the account and re-adding but didn’t fix the problem.

5

You can’t re-add it as an other account with imap and smtp server credentials - you need to add it as a Google account.

As for the inability to add alias addresses, Dan Moren published a workaround for this, so long as you have another imap account on the phone. For example, if one of the alias addresses is an imap account, you could add that account and turn off notifications for that account, set the fetch interval to manual, etc.

6

Riccardo Mori also just published an article both with details of this issue (and Google’s email announcing it) and ways to access Gmail going back to iOS 7: