Send gmail messages with google-api-ruby-client '0.9.pre3'

Question

Working through sending gmail with the newer google-api-ruby-client in a rails 4 application.

require 'google/apis/gmail_v1'

Gmail = Google::Apis::GmailV1

class MailService

  def initialize(params)
    @params = params
  end

  def call
    message = Gmail::Message.new
    service = Gmail::GmailService.new
    message.raw = (redacted)
    service.request_options.authorization = current_user.token.fresh_token
    result = service.send_user_message(current_user.email, message)
  end

end

And this is the result from the call to the API:

Sending HTTP post https://www.googleapis.com/gmail/v1/users/me/messages/send?
200
#<Hurley::Response POST https://www.googleapis.com/gmail/v1/users/me/messages/send == 200 (63 bytes) 858ms>
Success - #<Google::Apis::GmailV1::Message:0x007fc9cf9b52dd
 @id="15096369c05cdb1d",
 @thread_id="15096369c05cdb1d">

The raw message sends without issue from the API explorer but when executed from my application I get a bounce email in my inbox. In the above example the redacted sample is a valid RFC 2822 formatted base-64 url safe string and fresh_token represents the oauth2 access token for the current user.

A look at the bounced mail

Bounce <nobody@gmail.com>
2:43 PM (19 minutes ago)
to me

An error occurred. Your message was not sent.

Anyone have any thoughts? It seems like perhaps my (sender) email is being picked up in the raw message but not the recipient... Though I suppose the API could be forwarding the bounce based on my oauth access token.

I very much appreciate any help. Thanks!

EDIT: Solution was to pass the RFC 2822 string as raw property without base64 encoding.

Have you tried supplying the constant string `'me'` instead of `current_user.email`? — Tholle, Oct 22 '15 at 07:52
Yes, have tried it with the same result. Email still bounces. — RangerRanger, Oct 23 '15 at 15:44
The VCR gem, ordinarily used for testing, can also be conveniently used to capture exactly what HTTP request(s) the gem is sending, so you can see how they differ from yours. Does kind of sound like a bug in the gem. Have you tried posting an issue to the gem's github repo? — jrochkind, Oct 23 '15 at 23:53
jrochkind: That's actually a really great idea. I didn't think about that at all. — RangerRanger, Oct 25 '15 at 03:16
Steve: That did it. I don't know if I'm blind or what but I thought I read that you have to pass the string in already encoded. Thanks! — RangerRanger, Oct 25 '15 at 03:17
for future visitors who might wonder what to pass to `message.raw`, I found this awesome [Mail gem](https://github.com/mikel/mail) to construct the `raw` email body. Works flawlessly and reduces manual effort. — Masroor, Oct 20 '20 at 15:26

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 28 '16 at 10:20

Steve Bazyl seems to be correct. The documentation on send_user_message is wrong as of (0.9.13). For raw, it says: "The entire email message in an RFC 2822 formatted and base64url encoded string. Returned in messages.get and drafts.get responses when the format=RAW parameter is supplied. Corresponds to the JSON property raw." As far as I can tell, this is simply incorrect.

I encountered this issue when updating from google-api-client 0.8 to 0.9 and removing the base64 encoding solved the problem. I.e. call in 0.8:

response = @service.execute(
  api_method: api.users.messages.to_h['gmail.users.messages.send'],
  body_object: {
    raw: Base64.urlsafe_encode64(mail.to_s)
  },
  parameters: {
    userId: 'me',
  }
)

became

message = { raw: mail.to_s }
res = @service.send_user_message('me', message, {})

in 0.9.

Reported as https://github.com/google/google-api-ruby-client/issues/474.

Send gmail messages with google-api-ruby-client '0.9.pre3'

1 Answers1