Official Google Calendar & Contacts Sync

Finally, you can sync your Gmail contacts and GCal to your mobile phone without having to use third party tools. Read about it here.

Video of xPL Gmail in Action

Here's a video of the xPL Gmail script I hacked together the other day. On the right of the screen is an RDP session to the HA server showing xPL Gmail running in a command prompt and the DCM message viewer below that. To the left is our HA GUI. I just added the capability of displaying osd.basic messages to our GUI.

A test email is sent to the monitored Gmail account. xPL Gmail polls for new mail periodically and when it finds a new message, it issues an osd.basic xPL message which is captured by the DCM logger. xAP Floorplan grabs OSD messages and dumps them into the HA MySQL database which our GUI pulls data from. The message gets displayed in the GUI for a short time before disappearing.

xPL Gmail Notifier

I've taken the Python source for Gmail Notifier and modified it (with code from the Python xPL Toolkit) to issue an xPL osd.basic message when it encounters a new email message. Since it's Python, you can easily modify notifier.py to change the xPL message to whatever you want. I'll leave that as an exercise to you. A few things, before you grab the zip file (comments I left in the code):

# * changes to remove the tray icon as pytrayicon is not
#   supported in windows
# * removed the popup that notifies of a new email
# * added xPL support to generate osd.basic messages
#   containing sender of new email
# * since there's no tray icon, you cannot reconfigure from the gui
#   after you've configured once before.  therefore if you need to 
#   change your settings again, edit .notifier.conf located in
#   c:\documents and settings\your_login

You'll need to install a few things first besides Python - PyGTK and GTK. Go here and follow the directions for PyGTK for Microsoft Windows. Finally, here's my zip file.

Language searching in GMail

Lately, I've been getting a bunch of Ukranian or Russian spam in my GMail account. Apparently, there is now a method of searching your email based on language. In the search box, just put lang:Russian or to make a filter, put that in the Has the words field

Checking Gmail with xAP Mail Monitor

xAP Mail Monitor can't authenticate over SSL, so by itself it can't check Gmail. Like the previous post, Stunnel can fix that. I changed my stunnel.conf file as follows:

[pop3s]
accept  = 127.0.0.1:110
connect = pop.gmail.com:995

I had to leave the POP3 port as 110 since you can't specify the port in Mail Monitor. Re-start Stunnel and start Mail Monitor. Add the account by clicking File > Properties and selecting "Mailbox and Logins" under "Mail Monitor Configuration." Add an address, setting email address to your_gmail_address@gmail.com, mail server as localhost, login username your_gmail_address and set your Gmail password. That's it.

This will also work with most other mail apps that need SSL support. Just fill out the POP settings as above.

Command line emailing via Gmail's POP3 interface

Gmail has a POP3 interface which lets you use your own email client. This opens up a lot of possibilities. One thing I use a lot is the command line email tool Blat, but it can't deal with Gmail's SSL requirement. That's where Stunnel comes in. It will wrap the TCP connections from Blat inside SSL.

After installing Stunnel, edit the config file stunnel.conf. I made the following changes:

; Use it for client mode
client = yes

[ssmtp]
accept  = 127.0.0.1:465
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465

Save the changes and start Stunnel. This makes it look like you have an SMTP server running on your local machine at port 465. Next, just point blat to this local smtp server.

blat -install 127.0.0.1 your_user_name@gmail.com 1 465 - your_user_name your_password

That's it. You can now send email from scripts and batch files using Gmail's SMTP server.

You can also point other mail apps to this port if they don't support SSL for sending mail.