I’m working on a hobby project and need to connect to Gmail using C programming language. I know Python has some nice libraries that make Gmail access pretty straightforward, but I can’t find anything similar for C.
Basically I want to build something like a filesystem interface that uses Gmail storage, kind of like those old Gmail drive projects. I’ve been searching around but most examples I find are either in Python or other high level languages.
Does anyone know of any open source C libraries that can handle Gmail authentication and basic operations like reading emails, sending messages, or accessing attachments? I’m not looking for anything too fancy, just the basic functionality to get started.
Any suggestions or pointers to documentation would be really helpful. Thanks!
I built something similar recently. The Google Client Libraries have C++ components you could adapt, but I went a different route - used libmicrohttpd with libcurl to make a small web server that handles OAuth flow much cleaner. The real pain isn’t the API calls, it’s getting token refresh right. I just store tokens in a file and refresh before each API call - saved me tons of debugging headaches. Gmail filesystem is totally doable, but you’ll need your own caching layer since the API rate limits you.
I faced a similar challenge a while back when developing a C application that required Gmail integration. While there isn’t a comprehensive library specifically designed for C, leveraging existing libraries like libcurl for HTTP requests and cJSON for handling JSON responses can help. The Gmail API operates over REST, so once you set up the OAuth2 authentication flow, the rest boils down to making standard HTTP requests. My approach involved using libcurl for both token management and making API calls, which covered sending emails and accessing attachments. Although I didn’t specifically build a filesystem interface, the core functionality you need is quite feasible with this method.
yeah, dealing with the gmail API in C isn’t easy like in python. i used libcurl too but had to handle all that oauth2 myself. it’s a pain, but totally worth it once you get it running. just be prepared for some headaches along the way!