Getting "bzr send" to work with GMail

One of the nice features of Bazaar is the ability to send a bundle of changes to someone via email. If you use a supported mail client, it will even open the composer with the changes attached. If your client isn't supported, then it'll let you compose a message in your editor and then send it to an SMTP server.

GMail is not a supported mail client, but there are a few work arounds listed on the wiki. Those really come down to using an alternative mail client (either the editor or Mutt) and sending the mails through the GMail SMTP server. Neither solution really appealed to me. There doesn't seem to be a programatic way of opening up GMail's compose window and adding an attachment (not too surprising for a web app).

What is possible though is connecting via IMAP and adding messages to the drafts folder (assuming IMAP support is enabled). So I wrote a small plugin to do just that. It can be installed with the following command:

bzr branch lp:~jamesh/+junk/bzr-imapclient ~/.bazaar/plugins/imapclient

And then configure the IMAP server, username and mailbox according to the instructions in the README file. You can then use "bzr send" as normal and then complete and send the draft at your leisure.

One nice thing about the plugin implementation is that it didn't need any GMail specific features: it should be useful for anyone who has their drafts folder stored on an IMAP server and uses an unsupported mail client.

The main area where this could be improved would be to open up the compose screen in the web browser. However, this would require knowing the internal message ID for the new message, which I can't see how to access via IMAP.

Comments:

Jeremy -

I haven't used bzr send yet, but I gather that it doesn't use sendmail to send the mail. That would seem the logical choice, as you could then configure your MTA to send via Gmail's SMTP server.

James Henstridge -

Bazaar does have support for sending to an SMTP server, and that is what the first solution on the wiki page I linked to describes.

But that doesn't let you pick recipients from your address book or defer sending the message in case you want to edit it (in contrast, my solution always requires additional work to send the message). The plugin I wrote isn't obviously superior to those solutions, but it does have some benefits.

LaserJock -

Thanks for this James, I like it much better than a "send via Gmail SMTP" route. I really like the idea of it showing up as a draft in my Gmail. In fact, I'd love to get reportbug to do the same thing so I could do similar when reporting Debian bugs.

Chris Conway -

Thanks! I beat my head against to wall trying to figure this out a while ago and finally gave up when I figured out you can't make an attachment through the GMail "API"...

Tom Berger -

Fantastic!

Note that this doesn't work for me (with Gmail) when the mailbox argument to append is a Unicode string. Converting it to an old-school string does the trick.