Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Google App-Engine Mail Service: Unauthorized Sender Error

I was messing around with the Google App-Engine mail service and I stumbled upon a little gotcha that I feel like sharing.

To cut a long story short - you can send emails though the mail service only from emails of accounts (google accounts or other Google app domains) registered as Developers from the Google app engine dashboard (Google App-Engine--> Dashboard--> Developers).

It took me a while to figure this out because:
  1. It doesn't make any sense: assume you wanna setup an admin account to send out mini-reports from your scheduled cron jobs, in this scenario you're supposed to setup your admin@yourDomain.com as a Developer!?
  2. I am linking this Google app deployed to appspot to a domain I have registered with Google, so I thought the app could send emails only from accounts registered as administrator of my given domain, which would make slightly more sense!

But then - I can only blame myself 'cause the documentation clearly says:
The sender must be either the address of a registered developer for the application, or the address of the user for the current request signed in with a Google Account.

As a matter of fact, I never read the documentation till I am desperate (who does?).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Instructions / Documentation are for people with no imagination.

zproxy said...

have you considered using rss or twitter (sms) for alerts instead of email?

Unknown said...

@ian

either that or people with a lot of time on their hands :)

@zproxy

that's definitely a good idea - I had in mind some kind of twitter interaction for users but I didn't think of twitter/rss feeds for admin purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!

Gabor Farkas said...

You've helped me out as well, i don't read documentation neither :)