For a long time, I've been using my own e-mail client to fetch e-mails from my Gmail account with IMAP and to send e-mails from it with SMTP. I use PHP's IMAP module for receiving part and the library PHPMailer for sending.
In the last few weeks, Google has started harassing me constantly to log in to my Gmail account "with my browser". And so I have. I've used every "trick" in the book to unlock my account, but it only stays for a couple of minutes at best, and then they are back to blocking me again. I've spent so many hours troubleshooting this at this point that I'm 100% convinced that there must be somebody sending a lot of SPAM using compromised Gmail accounts from the same IP address as I am using. (It's a VPN.)
For this reason, I need to make imap_open() and PHPMailer either use a specified SOCKS proxy, or (better) a specified network interface on my computer. When using cURL to make HTTPS requests, for example, I am able to specify a network interface which makes it bypass the VPN connection (OpenVPN), and instead uses my "real" connection. However, imap_open() and PHPMailer both seem to utterly lack the ability to specify an alternative network interface for them to use, and also lack the ability to set a proxy (SOCKS or any other kind) for it to use.
As a result, I'm currently stuck having imap_open() and PHPMailer use the "default route" on my machine, which means they both use the VPN IP address to talk to Google's servers. Which means it thinks I'm that abusive bot, even though I'm just a single person with a single Gmail account, desperately trying to cling on to my last window into the world.
If there truly is no way to tell these things to connect through a different network interface, or a proxy, what can I possibly do?
Disconnecting from the VPN entirely is obviously not an option.
I have in the past spent significant time and effort trying to figure this out, but now it's actually critical for me to be able to use e-mail at all. I found that it was hopeless to search for and nobody understood what I was saying when asking people. Therefore, I have this time written this in a manner which cannot be misunderstood.
Update: It's been another day now and it just doesn't seem to fix itself. I believe this is going to continue until I find out how to use a specific network interface...