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Posts Tagged ‘gmail’

Google Buzz not Working for Us

11 February 2010 by Bret

Earlier this week Google released Buzz which to us feels like a social media API interface and Wave hybrid. Without going into all the details, Buzz allows you to share updates, photos and things of interest with your friends and/or the world. You can get real time updates that are integrated with your inbox and other social media accounts like Twitter and Flickr.

The concept behind Buzz sounds pretty cool. We looked into it, added it to our Gmail accounts and have connected with each other as “friends”. Okay, now what?

Here’s the problem for us. We both have Gmail accounts, to which we’ve tied other Google features like iGoogle, Reader, Webmaster Tools, and Analytics. Nothing new or revelatory about that. The part of the Google account that we use the least is Gmail, aside from a couple mailing lists.

We have nothing against Gmail, in fact we love Gmail. We’d even wear “I heart Gmail” t-shirts under our jackets on a cold day. The Spam protection rocks (Yes, rocks, I could have used bitchin’ but didn’t want to take you back that far in time), the mailbox size is amazing, and the IMAP access is nothing short of awesome. But, we love Gmail inside Google Apps where our email addresses use our own domain name not Gmail’s, and where we do most of our correspondence. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t work with Google Apps, yet. We’ve read rumors that it’s coming though.

The larger problem we see is that in order to use Buzz you have to have a Gmail account and use that account for all your correspondence be it business or personal. That’s not the case with Twitter, Facebook or even Flickr. We can, and do, have one Twitter account for business tied to a business email and then individual personal accounts tied to different addresses. With the other social media apps I can use any email account to keep up with friends and clients. With Buzz I can only communicate with my friends who happen to have Gmail addresses, forget AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Mobile Me, etc. Finally, the big downside is business correspondence. How many people who want to be taken seriously use a plain ol’ Gmail address for a business email?

Even if Buzz does get added to Google Apps our fear is that you’ll still be limited to only communication with other Google Apps or Gmail users. That leaves out a lot of clients especially medium to larger organizations that run their own Exchange servers for email.

Bottom line, is a social media feature or app good when tied so closely to a particular email provider? We don’t think so. But perhaps we’re over thinking it. Maybe Buzz isn’t supposed to be used in a business environment. Guess that’s where Twitter and Facebook will have to pick up the slack.

Sending Email from Multiple Google Apps Accounts

20 October 2009 by Bret

PROBLEM: We need to be able to send emails from multiple accounts using Rails 2.3.4 and Google Apps. Our code was mostly correct, it worked in development because the ActionMailer classes were being loaded with each request. But in production all the emails were coming from one account, the account defined in the last mailer model file, for us UserMailer.

SOLUTION: The patch attached in the second post. The patch fixes actionmailer/lib/action_mailer/base.rb. No need for details on why other than to say smtp_settings and sendmail_settings are changed into superclass_delegating_accessor’s so that mail settings can be changed in each mail class.

This is needed especially when using Google Apps Standard because Google limits outgoing email to 500 per account per day.

After patching the base.rb file, we add our code to our production environment file.

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
 :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
 :port => 587,
 :domain => "domain.com",
 :user_name => "default@domain.com",
 :password => "password",
 :authentication => :plain,
 :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

We tried just assigning the user_name and password in the mailer class and got errors with our smtp_tls code were using, so we just duplicate all the other settings as well and it works. Our sample_mailer.rb code:

SampleMailer.smtp_settings = {
 :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
 :port => 587,
 :domain => "domain.com",
 :user_name => "contact@domain.com",
 :password => "password",
 :authentication => :plain,
 :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

This way we can now send from whatever email account we need to for each mailer.