I've been using the CPAN module Mail-Webmail-Gmail to purge a certain folder in my gmail account for some time now. As a matter of fact, I was the one who suggested the author to enable operations on more than one message at once, so deleting several messages won't take for ever, and will eventually cause gmail.com to temporarily ban you.
However, several months ago, a gmail.com interface change took place, and as a result Mail-Webmail-Gmail broke. Eventually I was too annoyed with it that I ended up fixing it myself, and submitted a patch to the CPAN Request Tracker. That was at 11-January-2006.
The author was unresponsive, and tired of waiting for it to be applied, I asked the CPAN gods to become a co-maintainer of the module. They did not reply. That was 06-February-2006.
Two weeks ago, I sent them a reminder and CCed it to module-authors@perl.org. I received many replies, among them one by brian d foy about the proper procedure. In any case, the author of Mail-Webmail-Gmail chose that exact date to upload a new version of Mail-Webmail-Gmail (two in fact - 1.04.1 and 1.05, that differ only in their version number.), and so all's well that ends well.
Meanwhile, Mail-Webmail-Gmail got a bad review because it did not work. Also, if you're wondering why you still need this module since Google is giving POP3 access - be aware that there are many operations that simply can't be done using POP3.
