Thursday, January 10, 2008

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.

4 comments:

Bob Erb said...

Thanks. "set up gnus to send through diff SMTP servers" is on my todo list. Lazy web to the rescue!

Unknown said...

message-send-hook

a said...

message-send-hook??? It's not needed for this code as this code is using advice to hook into the message-send-mail function.

When using a hook to solve this problem, you have to set the variables permanently, I like the cleanliness of having them only bound inside the 'let' statement.

Alex Ott said...

useful tip for using gnus + gmail:

(setq gnus-ignored-newsgroups "")

to enable showing of [Gmail]/* groups