Bonetree Blog

Configuring Gallery2 to send email using Gmail

I recently revived my online photo gallery but ran into a problem with sending mail. Unlike most of my other sites, I run this on a box that I have at home, which means that it’s affected by my ISP’s retarded firewall rules. Like most consumer ISPs, Rogers blocks outgoing connections on port 25 in a misguided effort to reduce spam from computers taken over by botnets and such. The only way to send out mail from your computer at home is to do so through the SMTP relay set up by Rogers (which involves jumping through some hoops in order to access successfully) or by connecting to an SMTP server that listens on an alternate port.

I chose the latter option, using Gmail to send my mail. The only snag here is that Gmail’s SMTP server requires a secure (SSL) connection, and Gallery’s admin screen doesn’t seem to be aware of secure settings. I took a look at Gallery’s SMTP code and it uses PHP’s fsockopen() to connect to the specified host, which means that it can do SSL easily under the hood. Gallery’s code doesn’t really take this into account when parsing the host name however, so we need to do a little tweak:

Line 68 in <gallery directory>/lib/smtp/smtp.php looks like this:

list ($config['smtp.host'], $port) = array_merge(explode(':', $config['smtp.host']), array(25));

In order to get it parsing the port and scheme properly, we’ll need to replace it with the following:

$url_info = parse_url($config['smtp.host']);
$config['smtp.host'] = '';
if( isset($url_info['scheme']) ) {
   $config['smtp.host'] = $url_info['scheme'].'://';
}
$config['smtp.host'] .= $url_info['host'];
$port = ( isset($url_info['port']) ) ? $url_info['port'] : 25;

Once that change is done, you need to set up your Site Admin > General > Email options in Gallery2. Server should be ssl://smtp.gmail.com:465 (the code change we made parses that URL correctly), and username/password should be self-explanatory. Note: You must use your entire Gmail address (e.g. username@gmail.com) here, and Google Apps users must use their domain name in place of gmail.com.

Now send out a test e-mail to make sure it works, and you’re done!

Posted in Development, Tutorials |
Tags: gallery2, gmail, php |