One of the tasks I dread is configuring a web server to send email correctly via Gmail. The simplest way of sending emails is SMTP, and there are a number of scripts out there that provide a simple method to send mail that way with a minimum of configuration. There’s even PHP mail(), although it’s less than reliable.

Out of the box, Gmail requires OAUTH2 for authentication and to share user data, which has the major advantage of not requiring that you store your username and password in the application that requires access to your account. While they have an ‘allow less secure apps’ option that allows SMTP access for legacy products like Microsoft Outlook, it just doesn’t seem like the right way forward. Google documents how to interact with their API with OAUTH2, so why not just use that instead of putting my username and password in plaintext in a bunch of prototypes and test scripts?

Those are the thoughts that run through my head every time this comes up for a project, and each time I’ve somehow forgotten the steps to do it, also forgotten to write it down, and end up wasting quite a bit of time due to my own foolishness. As penance, I’ve decided to document the process and share it with all of you, and then also make it work on an ESP8266 board running the Arduino development environment.

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