Experimental Sockets API in Google App Engine for SMTP connections

Question

With the recent release of App Engine 1.7.7, it is finally possible to make outbound connections with TCP or UDP sockets. This opens a whole world of new possibilities.

Using import socket in Python 2.5, I have been able to test successfully a few simple low-level commands (such as socket.getaddrinfo("smtp.gmail.com", 587)...)

I am now trying to initiate an authenticated SMTP connection on port 587:

import smtplib
session = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)

... but I immediately encounter a NotImplementedError from the gethostbyaddr function in _remote_socket.py. This is surprising, as the non-implementation of this function is not mentioned in the Google App Engine Sockets API Overview at https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/sockets/overview

Any idea what's going on here, and how I could circumvent this limitation?

Note : I have not yet migrated to Python 2.7. I am still using Python 2.5 and old_dev_appserver.py for the development server.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Could you try passing in local_hostname to the constructor?

session = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587, local_hostname='appengine.google.com')