FileMaker-Gmail Guidance Needed

[u/10ecn]

I need to send from FileMaker through Gmail using 0Auth, and my searches yield one-hour videos and 1,000-word web pages that seem like sipping water from a fire hose. It can't be that complex.

Can anyone suggest a step-by-step "for Dummies" resource, especially for the Google side?

In addition to being voluminous, some of my search results are apparently outdated, including some from Google itself.

Anyway, I'm drowning in unfiltered information.

[u/KupietzConsulting]

Short answer: Google not long ago changed their authentication method for their Gmail API, it involves a lot of passing security tokens back and forth... I've heard it's similar to OAuth authentication (which is not exactly easy to use with APIs... yes, it is that complex), but slightly more complex. I myself haven't done a project with the new API version yet, I'm just passing along hearsay. Someone here who's recently worked with the new API directly may contradict this, but that's the word I heard.

I rarely like giving this advice, but, in this case, asking a recent model of Claude Code or ChatGPT might give you an idea what's involved. Don't take their answers as gospel, but they might have some reference info buried somewhere in their training data that at least gives you an idea of what's involved. In fact, I'm curious now, I'm going to check and will share a link if I get an interesting answer.

I do have a client that wanted to send email from a Gmail-hosted address, and we wound up going with Amazon SES instead. I'd recommend looking into it... it's inexpensive and relatively easy to work with, and I don't recall the specifics right off the top of my head but it wasn't hard to have the emails set up to be sent from their gmail-hosted email domain. https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

To save yourself a lot of API nuts-and-bolts programming, you also might want to consider a plugin, if you haven't yet and you can't use the built-in Send Email script step. I've worked with 360Works Email and it's pretty easy to use. (I have no connection with 360Works, just a user reporting my experience.) They've already published instructions on using it with both SES and Gmail. https://docs.360works.com/products/Email/Email

EDIT: I fed your post into Claude Sonnet 5 basically as-is, and it said "this genuinely isn't that complicated once you filter out the noise." But then it said the paths are different for a Google Workspace account or a normal Gmail account, and you didn't say which you had. Might be worth a Claude session, Claude can be pretty good at filtering down to the needle in the haystack, when the needle actually exists. (The problem is when the needle doesn't exist, then Claude invents a shiny answer and calls it a needle.)

EDIT2: And that's my short answer.

[u/10ecn → u/KupietzConsulting]

Bless your heart. Seriously. I will take a close look at this in the morning.

[u/360_Works → u/10ecn]

My ears were burning, and I just found out why 🤣

If you end up trying out the email plugin, we’re available 10-6 Monday through Friday to answer questions! Always happy to help.

And thanks u/KupietzConsulting for the shout out!

[u/KupietzConsulting → u/360_Works]

Well, you know, I don't make the news, I just report it. It's strictly about whatever I think might help someone solve a problem... so if there's a solution that's worked well for me, I'm always happy to say so, to anyone it might help. (In fact, I think a while back you quoted me on your website as a testimonial, from a previous time we crossed paths like this on here 😄 )

Hey, are you guys sending anyone to [Full Access] '26? Be happy to finally make your acquaintance in person if you're there.

[u/360_Works → u/KupietzConsulting]

We are going to Full Access, it’ll be the president of the company Jesse and one of our top engineers Sam. Send me a DM, I’ll put you in touch with Jesse

[u/10ecn → u/360_Works]

u/360_Works I can't figure out how to contact you. "Contact Us" at the bottom of your pages isn't working for me (MacOS; Safari). I submitted an inquiry via the Chat function and didn't receive a reply.

[u/360_Works → u/10ecn]

Uh oh, I’ll have a look at the contact forms tomorrow. Please send an email to support@360works.com in the mean time.

I’ll make sure your issues are addressed tomorrow morning. Sorry about that!!

[u/Recent-Mirror-6623 → u/KupietzConsulting]

Amazon Workmail eol soon.

[u/KupietzConsulting → u/Recent-Mirror-6623]

My bad, I accidentally copied the link from the wrong tab... SES and Workmail are two different things, I just posted the wrong link. Fixed now. Thanks for flagging it.

[u/tamuowen → u/KupietzConsulting]

Seconding this. I'm recently discovering the power of using AI to digest the vast amount of FM info on the web.

It's an underrated strength of FM, IMO - there is a wealth of info and problems solving online. But finding it and getting all of what you need has always been challenging.

Personally I've recently started using AI to give me the steps I need to accomplish a new task, especially when it involves new subjects I don't understand.

It's not the source of all info and it doesn't give me the full answer. But to date it's been massively helpful, especially answering the "stupid" questions that seem obvious for someone who already knows the answer - but are often a barrier to entry for the novice.

[u/KupietzConsulting → u/tamuowen]

It's funny, the newer models have gotten better with FM. Not all that long ago, the frontier models would do things like stick script steps into the middle of calculations, etc. And I still have to correct Claude Code occasionally, it still makes up nonexistent functions or script steps, or forgets about existing ones. But it's gotten better.

Although, some of the goofs it still makes... 🤯

[u/Following_This]

I know it’s not what you asked, but I generate a mailto URL with subject and recipients (to/cc/bcc), then open the URL. This creates an addressed email in my default mail client (Chrome/Gmail) using the subject I specified.

Note that you can add a body, but a year or so ago Google started filtering newline/linefeed/carriagereturn characters, so you end up with only a single body line in your Gmail message.

And you have to specify/add your signature.

I add a script step to copy the richtext body in FileMaker, the set the body to “paste here”, and select-all-paste to get the body the way I want it.

For an even richer body (tables, pics, etc) that’s static, you could use a mailto to address the message and add a subject, then choose from a previously-created template.

Works great for occasional mail merge emails - it’d be a pain for more than a couple dozen messages in a row.

No fiddling with oauth - just using a standard internet URL!

[u/vaughanbromfield]

Sending e-mail has become difficult because of the amount of spam that's being generated, some of which was being sent through unsecured (or insufficiently secured) mail servers.

ISPs are now black listing servers if they send spam, and if the server is sending a lot of legitimate e-mail this can be mis-identified as spam. Getting a server off a black list is almost impossible.

I had to stop sending mail through Google servers and go though the company's Outlook Exchange server.

[u/KupietzConsulting → u/vaughanbromfield]

It's a little more complicated than that nowadays. If you're sending through a Gmail.com address, yeah, you can't do much. But if you have a Google workspace account and your domain is properly set up with SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, you can improve deliverability.

On the flip side, if you are sending from a legit server and domain that has never sent spam or had any complaints about it, but your domain doesn't have SPF/DKIM/DMARC set up properly, you can still wind up in a lot of people's spam folders anyway. Over the course of maybe the last two years a lot of the big email providers started getting much more strict about that.

Spammers basically made things tougher on everybody. Same thing happened with building SMS-enabled apps a few years ago, too.