FYI: 'free' GMAIL ARCHIVER steals passwords?!?

[ahhaa]

just found on Larry Dignan's blog: {http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=936}

An application dubbed G-Archiver backs up your Gmail account to a hard drive with a not-so-nice twist: It swipes your user name and password. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror outlines a chilling tale as told by Dustin Brooks, one of his readers.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I’ll give it a try.

It didn’t really have the functionality I was looking for, but being a programmer myself I used Reflector to take a peek at the source code. What I came across was quite shocking. John Terry, the apparent creator, hard coded his username and password to his gmail account in source code. All right, not the smartest thing in the world to do, but then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box! Having just entered my own information I became concerned.

I opened up a browser and logged in to gmail using his account information. It still worked.

[Baldrick]

I use IMAP to download/sync emails to outlook and then backup the outlook folder.

[stiltman]

I use IMAP to download/sync emails to outlook and then backup the outlook folder.

I do the same thing using OE