Gmail and OAuth, Ruby developers haz it

26 May

Posted by Nicolas in Ruby
Tags: gem, gmail, Google Apps, IMAP, oauth, Ruby, SMTP, XOAuth

You’ve probably heard about Google launching OAuth to access Gmail and Google Apps Mail.

Developers can now grab emails thanks to the IMAP protocol, without asking for a password. It’s awesome to see an “old” technology, IMAP, meeting a new one, OAuth. And no need to use a new API.

To help other Ruby developers integrating Gmail+OAuth, we published a new gem, gmail_xoauth. Once installed, you get updated Net::IMAP and Net::SMTP libraries, ready to authenticate via XOAUTH. And of course, it works with Google Apps too.

To authorize on ‘imap.gmail.com’, instead of giving a string password, you give a hash of options so the SASL Initial Client Request will be generated and sent over the wires for you.

require 'gmail_xoauth'
imap = Net::IMAP.new('imap.gmail.com', 993, usessl = true, certs = nil, verify = false)
imap.authenticate('XOAUTH', 'roger.moore@gmail.com',
  :consumer_key => 'anonymous',
  :consumer_secret => 'anonymous',
  :token => '4/nM2QAaunKUINb4RrXPC55F-mix_k',
  :token_secret => '41r18IyXjIvuyabS/NDyW6+m'
)
messages_count = imap.status('INBOX', ['MESSAGES'])['MESSAGES']
puts "Seeing #{messages_count} messages in INBOX"

The principle is the same for SMTP:

require 'mail'
require 'gmail_xoauth'
 
mail = Mail.new do
     from 'roger.moore@gmail.com'
       to 'marcel@amont.com'
  subject 'This is a test email'
     body 'Hi!'
end
 
smtp = Net::SMTP.new('smtp.gmail.com', 587)
smtp.enable_starttls_auto
secret = {
  :consumer_key => 'anonymous',
  :consumer_secret => 'anonymous',
  :token => '4/nM2QAaunKUINb4RrXPC55F-mix_k',
  :token_secret => '41r18IyXjIvuyabS/NDyW6+m'
}
smtp.start('gmail.com', 'roger.moore@gmail.com', secret, :xoauth) do |session|
  session.send_message(mail.encoded, mail.from_addrs.first, mail.destinations)
end