share the same cookie between two website using PHP cURL extension

Question

I want to get the contents of some emails in my gmail account. I would like to use the PHP cURL extension to do this. I followed these steps in my first try:

1. In the PHP code, output the contents of https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth.
2. In the browser, the user input username and password to login.
3. In the PHP code, save cookies in a file named cookie.txt.
4. In the PHP code, send request to https://mail.google.com/ along with cookies retrieved from cookie.txt and output the contents.

The following code does not work:

$login_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth';
$gmail_url = 'https://mail.google.com/';
$cookie_file = dirname(__FILE__) . '/cookie.txt';

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $login_url);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
echo $output;

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $gmail_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
echo $output;

curl_close($ch);

Answer 1

Your approach is wrong. You cannot retrieve the contents of https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth and output it, expect the user to fill in the details and press login. Since the form is defined as

<form action="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth" method="post">

the login details will be submitted by the browser to that page and your script never get hold of the cookies. You need to submit a post request to https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth already with the username and password. Only then curl will receive a response with the cookies.

That said, I'd suggest you scrape all this, enable IMAP in GMail and use that to access your e-mails.