I want to email my customers using different "roles" (e.g. info@ , customer-support@, tech-support@, no-reply@).
I've tried 2 approaches:
- Multiple "users"/accounts in my Gmail for business application.
- Single gmail account with multiple aliases.
I started by setting up a Service Account with global delegation for my Gmail for Business application.
To test that it works, I've set up 2 users: lev@mydomain.com and root@mydomain.com. Indeed, I can successfully send email both from lev@ and root@.
However, when I tried adding 5 distinct user accounts for my application, Gmail got paranoid of bots/abuse and asked me to prove that all the accounts are "human" including setting up passwords, signing in and SMS-text validation via phone. Moreover, they require different phones for different accounts to prove it's a different person. So the setup of the accounts becomes a major issue.
I also want to avoid creating multiple accounts since I'm paying for each one, and since semantically, all the roles are just a single account. So aliases seem like a better idea.
The problem is that when I'm trying to send email and set the "from" field to the alias (e.g. from:no-reply@mydomain.com), I'm getting the following exception:
Exception in thread "main" com.google.api.client.googleapis.json.GoogleJsonResponseException: 403 Forbidden
{
"code" : 403,
"errors" : [ {
"domain" : "global",
"message" : "Delegation denied for root@mydomain.com",
"reason" : "forbidden"
} ],
"message" : "Delegation denied for root@mydomain.com"
}
Anyone faced and solved this issue?
The authentication/credential code is as follows:
/*
* Set up a hashmap HashMap<String, Gmail> gmailServiceByAccount where
* gmailServiceByAccount.get(emailAccount) contains an authorized Gmail service
*/
private void prepareService(String emailAccount) throws Exception {
if (gmailServiceByAccount.containsKey(emailAccount)) {
return;
}
HttpTransport httpTransport = GoogleNetHttpTransport.newTrustedTransport();
JsonFactory jsonFactory = JacksonFactory.getDefaultInstance();
GoogleCredential credential = new GoogleCredential.Builder()
.setTransport(httpTransport)
.setJsonFactory(jsonFactory)
.setServiceAccountId(Config.getInstance().getProperty(Config.gmail_service_account))
.setServiceAccountPrivateKeyFromP12File(new File(Config.getInstance().getPathToGmailCredential()))
.setServiceAccountScopes(Arrays.asList(GmailScopes.GMAIL_COMPOSE))
.setServiceAccountUser(emailAccount)
.build();
gmailServiceByAccount.put(
emailAccount,
new Gmail.Builder(httpTransport, jsonFactory, credential)
.setApplicationName(Config.getInstance().getProperty(Config.google_client_api_application_name))
.build());
}
And the code which sends the email is as follows:
/**
* Send an email using the parameters provided.
*
* @param fromPersonalName : the free text description of the "from" address (e.g. "Customer Suppport" or "No Reply").
* @param fromAddress : the email address of the sender, the mailbox account (e.g. customer-support@mydomain.com).
* @param to : the email address of the recepient.
* @param subject : Subject of the email.
* @param htmlContent : (may be null) The HTML-styled body text of the email.
* @param plainTextContent : (may be null) The plain text body of the email (e.g if the customer email client does not support or disables html email).
*/
public void sendMail(String fromPersonalName, String fromAddress, String to, String subject, String htmlContent, String plainTextContent)
throws Exception {
prepareService(fromAddress);
Properties props = new Properties();
Session session = Session.getDefaultInstance(props, null);
MimeMessage email = new MimeMessage(session);
InternetAddress tAddress = new InternetAddress(to);
InternetAddress fAddress = new InternetAddress(fromAddress);
fAddress.setPersonal(fromPersonalName);
email.setFrom(fAddress);
email.addRecipient(javax.mail.Message.RecipientType.TO, tAddress);
email.setSubject(subject);
Multipart multiPart = new MimeMultipart("alternative");
if (!StringValidation.isEmpty(plainTextContent)) {
MimeBodyPart textPart = new MimeBodyPart();
textPart.setContent(plainTextContent, "text/plain");
textPart.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/plain; charset=\"UTF-8\"");
multiPart.addBodyPart(textPart);
}
if (!StringValidation.isEmpty(htmlContent)) {
MimeBodyPart htmlPart = new MimeBodyPart();
htmlPart.setContent(htmlContent, "text/html; charset=\"UTF-8\"");
multiPart.addBodyPart(htmlPart);
}
email.setContent(multiPart);
ByteArrayOutputStream bytes = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
email.writeTo(bytes);
String encodedEmail = Base64.encodeBase64URLSafeString(bytes.toByteArray());
Message message = new Message();
message.setRaw(encodedEmail);
gmailServiceByAccount.get(fromAddress).users().messages().send(fromAddress, message).execute();
}
