Re: [Evolution] Evolution, VPNs and Google

[Japhering <japhering gmail com>]

On Wed, 2019-04-17 at 09:11 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> What's the best practice for using Evolution across a VPN with GMail
> ?
>
> It seems that every time I'm on a VPN either incoming, outgoing or
> both operations fail.
>
> The VPN is setup at a system level - Evolution knows nothing about
> it.
> The only issues I ever get are if I start the VPN while Evolution is
> connected - presumably that's because the connections are persistent
> (i.e. you don't login everytime the mail is refreshed) and the
> packets
> get confused where they are supposed to go. I tend to get in to the
> habit putting Evolution offline before starting the VPN.

When I'm not in my office, the boot the laptop, start the VPN and once
the VPN is setup, then and only then I start Evolution.  I've worked
this way for 30 plus years, dating back to when I was traveling the
world for big blue.

>  Occaisionally, I'll get
> a Google notice that it blocked an attempted access, but it doesn't
> happen consistently.
>
> Is it a corporate VPN or one of the internet free ones - it may be
> that
> Google has blacklisted known sources of problems (like one of the
> throw-away VPN sites).

I'm using ProtonVPN from the same folks that provide ProtonMail, a paid
version supporting many hundreds of servers.  And it doesn't matter if
I'm using a local Texas base server, a server based elsewhere in the
world or ProtonVPN's secure core servers, the behavior is the same.

The only thing that comes to mind is what type of connection is the
outbound smtp server expecting tcp or udp.  If it is udp, then that is
my problem as I typically run a tcp vpn because of some of the tools I
need only work over tcp.

Mike