Dot-A-Lot

GMail Hacking

I wanted to pickup mail messages from my Gmail account programmatically and post them to a blog account. I though I would use POP but in reading Google access options, I found you can pickup your mail as an RSS feel (Atom). I was really excited and got working on it. It turned out to be pretty simple - I used the atom library Atom.Net(C#) once I pulled the feed.

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
namespace Gmail
{ 
   class AtomClient 
   { 
      private WebRequest wrGETURL; 
      private Stream feedStream; 
      private string username; 
      private string password; 
      public AtomClient(string url, string username, string password) 
      { 
         this.username = username; 
         this.password = password; 
         feedStream = GetFeedStream(url); 
      } 

      private Stream GetFeedStream(string url) 
      { 
         byte[] bytes; 
         wrGETURL = WebRequest.Create(url); 
         bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(username + ":" + password); 
         wrGETURL.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + 
            Convert.ToBase64String(bytes)); 
         return wrGETURL.GetResponse().GetResponseStream(); 
      } 
      public void GetFeeds() 
      { 
         Atom.Core.AtomFeed atomFeed = Atom.Core.AtomFeed.Load(feedStream); 
         Atom.Core.Collections.AtomEntryCollection entries = atomFeed.Entries; 
         foreach(Atom.Core.AtomEntry entry in entries) 
         { 
            Console.WriteLine(entry.Uri.AbsoluteUri); 
            //Stream stream = GetFeedStream(entry.Uri.AbsoluteUri); 
            //WriteStreamToConsole(stream); 
         } 
      } 
      void WriteStreamToConsole(Stream currentStream) 
      { 
         //Read the Response Steam. 
         StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(currentStream); 
         string responseText = reader.ReadToEnd(); 

         //Close the Stream. 
         currentStream.Close(); 
         Console.WriteLine(responseText); 
      } 
   }
}

The problem was the link pointing to the full message never worked for me. After trying numerous things, I decided to go back to POP. I found a good POP3 library, OpenPOP. The only problem was Google makes you authenticate using SSL. After finding an open source C# library (Org.Mentalis.Security) and integrating it to OpenPOP, I was on my way.

using System;
using System.Xml;
namespace Gmail
{ 
   class consumer 
   { 
      static void Main() 
      { 
         OpenPOP.POP3.POPClient popClient =
         new OpenPOP.POP3.POPClient("pop.gmail.com", 995, 
         "yourUserAccount@gmail.com", "yourPassword", 
         OpenPOP.POP3.AuthenticationMethod.TRYBOTH,true); 
  
         for (int i=1; i <= popClient.GetMessageCount(); i++) 
         { 
            Console.WriteLine("message: " + i); 
            OpenPOP.MIMEParser.Message msg = popClient.GetMessage(i,false); 
            string msgStr = string.Empty; 
            msg.GetMessageBody(msgStr); 
            Console.WriteLine("RawMessageBody: " + msg.RawMessageBody); 
            Console.WriteLine("ID: " + msg.MessageID); 
            Console.WriteLine(
            "================================================="); 
         } 

      } 
   }
}

That did it :)

I then did the programmatic posting to the blog and placed that in a service but I will leave that for another day :)