How to log into a Google account programmatically

Other Questions Gmail
1

I’m attempting to create a program that automatically logs me into my Google account so I can retrieve session cookies and use other Google services. Unfortunately, my current method isn’t successful, as I’m receiving an error indicating that cookie support is disabled in my browser.

Here’s what my code looks like:

string loginUrl = "https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLoginAuth";
string postData = string.Format("Email={0}&Passwd={1}&signIn={2}&PersistentCookie={3}&GALX={4}",
    "[email protected]", "mypassword", "Log In", "yes", "TokenString");

HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(loginUrl);
webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
webRequest.Referer = "https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin";
webRequest.Method = "POST";
webRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36";
webRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
webRequest.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();

byte[] data = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(postData);
webRequest.ContentLength = data.Length;

using (Stream stream = webRequest.GetRequestStream())
{
    stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
}

HttpWebResponse webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream()))
{
    string result = reader.ReadToEnd();
    Console.WriteLine(result);
}

Despite using a CookieContainer, the response indicates that cookie functionality is turned off. I’ve also tried modifying headers, but nothing has resolved the issue. Has anyone else dealt with this problem and found a fix?

2

Google killed direct login through form submissions back in 2017 for security reasons. That POST request method to ServiceLoginAuth used to work years ago, but it’s dead now - doesn’t matter how you configure your cookies.

I’ve moved several old systems away from screen scraping to OAuth2. You’ll need to completely rebuild your auth flow. Set up the authorization code flow, handle redirects to Google’s consent screen, and deal with refreshing access tokens.

For session stuff, just use Google’s client libraries - they handle all the OAuth2 headaches for you. The Google.Apis.Auth.OAuth2 NuGet package manages tokens automatically and plays nice with other Google services.

If you really need programmatic access without user clicks, check out service accounts with domain-wide delegation for G Suite setups. Skips the interactive auth completely, but your admin needs to set it up first.

3

Google’s auth system moved way past simple form submissions years ago. Direct POST requests don’t work anymore - they’ve got OAuth2, 2FA, and tons of security measures blocking programmatic logins.

That cookie error? Just the beginning. Fix that and you’ll hit CAPTCHAs, device verification, suspicious activity blocks - the whole nine yards.

Don’t fight Google’s security. Use their OAuth2 flow instead. Problem is, implementing OAuth2 properly gets messy fast with all the token refresh cycles.

I’ve dealt with this nightmare in production systems. Automation platforms clean this up big time. Skip wrestling with auth code and token management - set up Google service integration through visual workflows instead.

You get proper OAuth2 handling, automatic token refresh, and can chain multiple Google services without writing auth boilerplate. Easy to add error handling and retry logic too.

Visual approach makes debugging way simpler than digging through auth code when things break.

Check out Latenode for proper Google service authentication: https://latenode.com

4

Yeah, Google killed that old login method years ago. If you try scraping auth that way, you’ll just get your IP flagged. OAuth2 is the only legit option now, but it’s a hassle to set up with all the redirect handling.