I need to send emails from my web application (on account creation, password reset, etc.). This application will most likely be hosted on a standard hosting site (or possibly on Amazon EC2), not on Google App Engine.
However, I like the ease of use for sending email through App Engine. Is there a way to host your application elsewhere but use App Engine to send emails programatically? I suppose I could send a web request from my application to a custom application on App Engine, parse the request, and then send the email from App Engine.
However, I would like to avoid having to create an application on App Engine even if it is very simple as it would be another item to maintain. Is there a simpler way to just use App Engine as the email gateway, similar to using Google Apps for my Domain?
I don't need to receive email by the application. Also, I would like all emails to come from the same domain (like mail#example.com) regardless of if it were sent from the hosted application or App Engine.
You can do this using remote_api. Simply upload a Python app with nothing but the remote api handler included; you can then use the Python remote api library to send emails via App Engine.
Note that emails sent by the App Engine Mail API have to be from an administrator of the app (or the logged in user, but this doesn't apply over remote api). Thus, you'll want to add whatever from account you want as an administrator to the app.
Edit: As mentioned, I am totally wrong! Above post is correct.
First, I am very positive if you want to use App Engine's features you need to actually build an app on it. You can't use their API on external applications. You are right though that you could simply send a request to your app engine app if you wanted it to send email. I don't see how it would be too hard to maintain if that's all it is doing.
Second, if you are planning to send emails via GMail's service, they don't allow you to mask the from address so you will always see it from whatever gmail address you're sending it from.
Why not just send emails from your application but use whatever email service you use now? In most languages and frameworks, SENDING email and not managing it is a breeze.
Related
We have a google cloud endpoint (running on google app engine) that occasionally sends an email to a user, such as when a password is being rest. It works fine when the endpoint is accessed via ourapi.appspot.com.
However, it doesn't always work when the endpoint is accessed via ourapi.company.com. We setup this url up as a custom domain in app engine. In particular, it works when the api is accessed in the U.S. It doesn't seem to work from some countries.
The endpoint executes but the email is never received. The code is written in Java and no exceptions are thrown.
Any ideas?
We currently have an App Engine application plus some Google Compute Engine backends. Unfortunately App Engine is not considered "in-network" so in order for App Engine to make requests to backend servers, the relevant ports must be made publicly available in the firewall which is obviously a security risk. It would be very convenient if our App Engine app could automatically "sign" all request to our backends by using a service account client to issue the requests. Is this possible?
And likewise, I'd love to also do this in the other direction, where requests from our GCE servers could be authenticated by App Engine as long as the requests are issued from a GCE service account. I naively tried the latter by issuing a request from GCE to a test handler on app engine that checks the current user (via the Users service) but unsurprisingly the user was null (since "users" and "service accounts" aren't exactly the same I didn't expect this to work - but hey worth a shot).
There's a fair amount of info on the web for issuing service-account-authenticated requests (e.g. to google APIs) but I can't find anything on authenticating incoming requests. Does such a thing exist? (ideally in Go)
There is a new feature coming out soon called Managed VMs. You can click on the following link for more details and signup for updates https://developers.google.com/cloud/managed-vms.
I've got a google spreadsheet owned by a GAE service account and I want my GAE Python app to update a cell in one of the rows.
Based on some reading, these are my findings:
the spreadsheets service is old-school. It's a Google Data API and most Google services are now on the Google API platform. For Google API services, one can use a service account to do two-legged oauth2 access, but not for Google Data API services. Oh, it seems one can do two-legged oauth on Google Data API services, but only if the app is on a Google Apps domain (which mine isn't)
I could implement a similar effect (i.e. a user of the app can use data in my spreadsheet and doesn't need to login or authorize in any way) by using my personal account. There's a complicated way that involves me to authorize the app once, store the token and reuse it when a user uses the app. There's another way, which is to use client login (i.e. I embed my personal login and password in the code and use it to authorize the app to access the data in my spreadsheet)
This latter approach seems fairly safe as well, but of course I must be very careful that my source code will not be exposed. The authorization is between the GAE app and the Google Data Spreadsheets API, so the actual user's machine is not involved at all.
My spreadsheet is owned by the service account and shared with my personal account.
Note that my app is also using the Google Drive API (to access some personal Drive files, also shared between me and the GAE service account), so for that it will authorize using the service account.
Can someone confirm that my findings are correct and this approach is sound?
You can use gdata.spreadsheets.client (Google Data API) on the OAuth2 (Google API platform) flow.
https://github.com/HatsuneMiku/googleDriveAccess
It uses 'oauth2client-gdata-bridge'.
Our customers want to send emails from our java appengine application using their email accounts, with their smtp servers. Is that possible? Verifying all their email addresses in appengine is NOT an option. Would it be possible to send email from an appengine application using an external SMTP server?
Thank you very much.
No, there's no way for an App Engine app to make a connection to an external SMTP server. If you want to do this, you'll need to find or build a webservice that sends email via an HTTP-based interface.
It's possibly to do today, but requires some indirection. If they set up a web form (cgi script, web app , whatever) that forwards to their SMTP server (after making the appropriate authentication checks, of course), then it's a simple matter for an App Engine app to make a POST.
Discovered a problem with connecting all together - Facebook, GWT and App Engine.
I need to authenticate user on my web site hosted on App Engine (Java) that uses GWT. After authentication, some information should be passed to server from facebook - like profile information, user list, etc.
Currently am trying to use facebook4gwt and authentication works fine, and I can obtain all needed information on client side, but can not transfer facebook session to server, particularly, obtain Facebook cookies for session verification.
Could anyone suggest any good solution for this? Probably, it would make sense to get rid of facebook4gwt and do everything on server side.
I have been using the gwt-facebook library for one year to authenticate users of my application on App Engine. When a user is already logged into Facebook, and has already authorized my application, I can automatically get the access_token in GWT and send it to the server which can then do the hard work (data syncing) with facebook-java-api library.