In our new tutorial I am going to tell you about inviting friends. I think that this is the most important part for every website, a key to success. Today I will show you how to create simple and effective Gmail contact importer using OAuth authorization and API. Also, I will tell about obtaining Google API access too.

Screenshots show you how to get to the access token information you'll need to connect and the full code is included to help you get authenticated and pull down the contacts list to display in the page's HTML output.

Automatically extracting attachments from Gmail can be important for reasons where you need to process the attached files periodically with a CRON job. Also it can be useful for automatically archiving important attachments. Below is a simple proof-of-concept plain PHP code, devoid of any object-oriented features that extracts attachments from your Gmail account. It uses PHPs imap extension to access the inbox.

His simple script opens an IMAP connection to the Gmail server and loops through your current emails (max of 16) and tries to find any that have attachments. It then extracts this part of the message, base64_decodes it, and saves the set of them to the local file system. You can download the source here.

Inviting friends is the most important part of the web project success. This post explains you how to import Gmail contacts from address book via Google open authorization protocol connect with PHP. It's simple just few configurations follow below four steps, use this script and give option to invite more friends.

Following a few simple steps and using this simple script - registering the domain under Google Accounts, verify ownership and use the OAuth consumer and secret keys in the script. It's then simple to grab the contacts and output their details as the "Contacts.php" example script shows.

Some friends of mine publish a literary journal that accepts submissions via email. At their request I wrote a script to download messages from the journal's Gmail account and do some simple parsing tasks. Most of the submissions are made using an HTML form and a corresponding mailer script on their website, so I knew the precise format of the incoming messages (see Figure 1). What I didn't know was how to access Gmail in PHP.

He tried out the libgmailer script first, but ran into roadblocks until he realized he could use something PHP already had - the imap functions. With these he shows how to make a connection to the Gmail servers, get the listing of messages and pull out the body for the one you want to parse.

I use a local Apache/MySQL server on a laptop to do a lot of my development '" I don't need a full mail server just to send mail. Also SMTP servers on dynamically assigned IP addresses are so untrusted these days that you can be pretty much guaranteed that a decent spam filter will reject your email based on a RBL lookup. By using Google Mail's authenticated SMTP service you bypass this restriction.

Their solution uses the ssmtp tool instead - a simpler MTA that doesn't require near the setup of others. They show you how to adjust the config to handle the PHP emails, set up some users and configure PHP (the sendmail_path in the php.ini) to push the emails through it. Because of the configuration changes, it then knows enough to push those emails out to Gmail's SMTP.

These days I tried some plugin to send mail message within bbpress via SMTP. Since my domains email is hosted with Google applications I decided to send my messages via the SMTP server from Gmail. I found several articles and tutorials, but a lot of them didn't work for me. [...] You need for this code example a PHP5 enabled web host (I tested only on Linux), the port 465 need to be open and of course you need a Gmail or Google applications account.

Complete code is provided - a smtpmailer function that takes in the standard mail parameters (to, from, subject, msg) and ships the message off to the Gmail STMP servers (on their custom port 465).

Now that GMail for your domain has arrived (if you're a lucky beta winner, that is) it's like hiring a world-class email server engineer and paying them nothing. It takes a little work because of GMail's security requirements, but you end up with a rock solid email server that won't send messages straight into spam folders.

He uses the PHPMailer pakcage to do the dirty work - ensuring the headers are correct and providing a simple API for your scripts to use. There's a brief code example with a small explaination, but there's really not that much to it - any coder could integrate it easily.

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