OsTicket is an open source app that allows you to receive emails and track them as tickets on your organization. You can do a lot with this tool without spending a lot of money on similar paid apps.

Well, the fact that yo don’t pay to use requires that you learn how to setup it on your own host and deal with some hard to fix error messages.

I was trying to configure Gmail on OsTicket to download emails via POP or IMAP, and used the Gmail IMAP server imap.gmail.com.

When I hit enter to save the configuration, I got the error below. Yes! That was the exact message truncated exactly on the link that I needed to use to fix it.

It was failing to authenticate on my Google Account. It all started happening after migrating from a dedicated server to a VPS on Dreamhost.

Can not authenticate to IMAP server: [ALERT] Please log in via your web browser: https://support.google.com/mail/acco

Well, when trying to investigate it I could not find this message on the log files anywhere.

This is the configuration I use and this was working on the old server, so it is the right one to use.

How to configure OsTicket for GMail
How to configure OsTicket for Gmail

I decided to play with the configuration to see if I could get a different error that would give me a better tip on how to fix it.

I checked “disabled” for the option “Fetching Email via IMAP or POP” and then the complete Gmail IMAP error message was displayed like in the image below.

OsTicket GMail IMAP error
Error when configuring OsTicket Gmail IMAP

So how, you just have to:

  • copy the URL from this message:
  • open the URL in an incognito window on your browser.
  • login with the email account and authorize the access.

Or, you can just authorize the access logging in with your Google account on this url: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Remember that in order to have all this working you must have

  • allowed access for insecure apps on your Gmail account
  • enabled POP and IMAP access on your Gmail configuration

Thanks! And let me know in the comments if this fixed your OsTicket email access.