In a recent post to the 9Lessons.info site, Srinivas Tamada shows you how to connect Gmail with your system to import contacts via the magic of OAuth (pulled from Gmail to you).

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.

New on PHPBuilder.com today there's a tutorial showing you how to download and parse messages from Google Mail. In their case it's grabbing and parsing submissions from a form.

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.

In this new post to the SeeIT Consult blog they show you how to use the Google Mail STMP service to send emails directly from PHP - no local MTA required.

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.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post about using the PHPMailer package to send email out via the Google Mail servers.

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).

GMail's "for your domain" email feature has already impressed quite a bit of the industry, but have you ever wished for something a little bit more? Have you wanted to be able to send things the same way, but from a PHP script? Vulgarisoip is here to help.

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.

[digg it]