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I had a longer than usual train ride on Friday, thanks to missing my usual one by about 20 seconds! The good news is, during the extended train ride I have added some new functionality to my SMTP Pro magento extension – it now optionally logs all emails to a database table and you can view the detail of them from within the Magento admin interface. I still can’t upload it to Magento connect however, so please download the release from here and let me know how it goes. Update: Fixed bug pointed out by Luis below – new release is 1.1.1.

I have also added a nice little event firing mechanism – I’m inviting fellow developers to suggest events they want fired, to make manipulating outbound emails easier for other extension developers. Currently the only one is smtppro_email_after_send but there is scope for adding many more – contact me!

I’ll add some notes about the new functionality below, but just to recap using my free smtp extension for Magento you can now:

• Configure Magento for sending email with any SMTP server
• Easily configure Magento to send email with GMail or Google Apps Email
• Diagnose connection problems using the email self test
• Send using a number of different gmail/google addresses if your email volumes are very high
• Enable a development mode and an email suppression mode
• View a log of all email sent from within Magento, the date they were sent and search and filter the list of emails
• Hook into a growing number of email related events to extend the email capability of Magento

All for free too, I think it compares favorably with the commercial extensions that offer the same functionality. I’d appreciate any opinions on that, as I’m aiming to have the best email extension for Magento. Anyway here’s some info about the new features, in case you care.
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I’ve had a couple of fellow Magento users contact me over the last couple of weeks about the 500 emails per day Google Apps and Gmail limit. I’m sure it’s in the class of good problems to have when you have more than 500 order related emails, or new customer sign-ups everyday! In this post I’ll detail my simple solution to the 500 email limit that Google imposed on their Gmail and Google Apps accounts when you are using an account as your transactional email sending account for Magento.

First, the problem is that you can only send 500 emails per day through Gmail or Google Apps – that’s fair enough, the accounts are supposed to be suitable for humans, not Magento stores. Also, you can pay for premier and get 2000 emails, so that’s not too bad either for $50/user!

Never fear though, I have modified my extension to help out. Basically here is how the change works, and how it is implemented. You can get the new version over on Magento Connect

Update: you can’t at the moment, so download directly from me for the time being.

Update: Thanks to Paulius there is a specially packaged version of the extension that will make it easy to install manually until I can get the Magento Connect version updated (which is still failing). Get that version here!

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In a bid to help solve a weird 404 error that Kevin has been experiencing with the self test I offered him a pre-release copy of my upcoming ‘unified’ Magento email extension. It will support both SMTP and Google Apps/Gmail along with a few new features.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try the extension please contact me or flick me an email or post a comment and let me know, I’ll send through the files, I’d rather not post it for public availability here yet, because it’s not as stable as I’d like. But expect it very soon!
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Wow a month since my last blog post, I’ll have to stop calling this a blog and make it a magazine if these blog posts don’t get more frequent huh?! Anyway, I do have something interesting to report from the world of Magento email extensions, particularly my Google Apps/Gmail extension and my SMTP Pro extension are in for a bit of a shake up.
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After some initial Google Base problems with Magento 1.3.2.1, I thought everything was going to be fine, only to get whacked with this error: Expected response code 200, got 403 Service forbidden: Account not registered for Google Base. I checked and checked again that my email/password was right, and that the Google account was registered for Google Base.

There wasn’t much help surfacing on Google for it, so I thought now that I have sifted through everything and looked at various sources, I’d compile a bit of an explanation and help guide for it. Please note this only affects 1.3.2.1, it is fixed in the newer versions of Magento, so unless you are wed to your current version, upgrade!

I posted a forum message on the Google Base boards and got this helpful reply:

• verify the application is not exceeding the api
  limits of approximately 5 requests per second;
• verify the proper uri is being used for the request.
• verify all the required attributes and proper values
  are being used for the item-type being inserted –
  check that all the rules for the item-type are being met.

Given my products were not anything special, I doubted the last option. Also given others were reporting success with the Magento Google Base capability (once the initial problem was fixed), I assumed it wasn’t the 5 requests per second problem either. So what was wrong with the request URI?

Well, to cut a long story short, it seems that my problem was due to the account being used for Google Base, also being a Google Apps account. If you’re interested in the details check out the login options for the Google Account API. The hosted Google Apps account did not have Google Base, but the Google account (with the same email and password) did. The login was succeeding, but then the account that was logged-in did not have access to Google Base!

The fix is to tell the GClient API to use the Google account only, not the HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE default. I found others have suggested this fix (or the workaround of using a non-Google Apps account) here.

The gist of it is to change this function call by adding two extra parameters: app\code\core\Mage\GoogleBase\Model\Service.php on line 49. The two parameters to add are: Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::CLIENTLOGIN_URI, 'GOOGLE' as shown below.

$client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($user, $pass, Zend_Gdata_Gbase::AUTH_SERVICE_NAME, null, '', $loginToken, $loginCaptcha, Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::CLIENTLOGIN_URI, 'GOOGLE');

That fixed the problem for me, now I just have to figure out which of the required Google Base attributes I’m missing!