Implementation: How to retrieve and send emails for different Gmail accounts?

Question

I need advice and how to got about setting up a simple service for my users. I would like to add a new feature where users can send and receive emails from their gmail account. I have seen this done several times and I know its possible.

There use to be a project for "Libgmailer" at sourceforge but I think it was abandoned. Is anyone aware of anything similar?

I have found that Gmail has a Python API but my site is making use of PHP.

I really need ideas on how to best go about this!

Thanks all for any input

Answer 1

any library/source that works with imap or pop will work.

Answer 2

Well if Google didn't come up with anything personally I'd see if I could reverse engineer the Python API by implementing it and watching it with a packet sniffer. My guess is it's just accessing some web service which should be pretty easy to mimic regardless of the language you're using.

Answer 3

Just a thought, Gmail supports POP/IMAP access. Could you do it using those protocols? It would mean asking your users to go into their gmail and enable it though.