Emacs Tip #9: Gnus/Gmail integration (using IMAP)

Like many folks, I use Google for more and more. When I noticed Google's announcement that Gmail supports IMAP, I knew I could read my Gmail from Emacs.

The question was, how do you set up the integration? The Emacs wiki had instructions on how to read email, which worked nicely. But I wanted to enable Gmail to gather the mail I sent from Emacs into its conversation groups (it's no Gnus threading, but it's a start). So how to enable that? At first I automatically Bcc'ed my Gmail account, but that was hacky. Then I noticed Gmail lets you use their SMTP server.

I found some documentation on how to use it, but it didn't work for me (wrong ports evidentially), and it was integrated differently than what I wanted.

So I used my favorite Emacs lisp feature, advice, and wrote the following snippet. It checks to see if the 'From:' address is a gmail address, in which case it uses Gmail's SMTP server.

(defadvice message-send-mail (around gmail-message-send-mail protect activate)
  "Set up SMTP settings to use Gmail's server when mail is from a gmail.com address."
  (interactive "P")
  (if (save-restriction
        (message-narrow-to-headers)
        (string-match "gmail.com" (message-fetch-field "from")))

      (let ((message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
            ;; gmail says use port 465 or 587, but 25 works and those don't, go figure
            (smtpmail-starttls-credentials '(("smtp.gmail.com" 25 nil nil)))
            (smtpmail-auth-credentials '(("smtp.gmail.com" 25 "username@gmail.com" nil)))
            (smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com")
            (smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com")
            (smtpmail-smtp-service 25)
            (smtpmail-local-domain "yourdomain.com"))
        ad-do-it)
    ad-do-it))

Note: You can also download the snippet directly.

And, as a good netizen, I updated the wiki appropriately.