NodeMailer Not Sending Emails

[gleekzorp]

Describe the bug
When you fill out the contact form and send it, it says the mail was sent but when we check Gmail it wasn't sent.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to the contact form
2. Click Submit

Expected behavior
Expect the front end to tell the user if the mail didn't send.

Additional context
Here are some resources I quickly found. We will need to update our nodemailer to not use the unsecured apps and try this oauth2 or change from Gmail to another provider.

• https://nodemailer.com/usage/using-gmail/
• https://nodemailer.com/smtp/oauth2/

[gleekzorp]

For easier reference.

Here are some resources that helped me solve this.

• https://nodemailer.com/smtp/oauth2/#example-3
• https://levelup.gitconnected.com/multi-purposes-mailing-api-using-nodemailer-gmail-google-oauth-28de49118d77
  • I got confused for a little bit because of how you have to add the oauthplayground as a redirect URL. Just follow the steps and you should be good to go.
  • Make sure to go to the oauthplayground to get your access token and refresh token after getting everything setup.
    • https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/

I have a feeling I might have to look back at this incase the access token and refresh token stop working and we still have it in testing mode.

[gleekzorp]

Sadly it isn't sending mail again. Luckily we get the correct error message for the user now.

[gleekzorp]

For easier reference. One of the keys to success in this was making sure to use googleapis package.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/googleapis

[gleekzorp]

Since the Google API app is in test mode it revokes the refresh token after about a week. In order to fix that you will need to publish your app under the 0Auth consent screen.

After the mailer stopped working again I did some exploring and came across this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rcRf7yswfM. His steps are very similar to levelup, but with a smaller code base, I might refactor to use some of his ideas. After watching this video I was reading the comments to see if anyone was having the same issues as me since his code was the same concept. There was a comment linking to this stack overflow post, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8953983/do-google-refresh-tokens-expire. They explain that the refresh token doesn't expire but later one of the solutions says the following:

"""
I experienced the same issue and later found out the mistake I was doing. Posting it here so that someone else might find it useful too.

I found out this clue in the Google docs: "A Google Cloud Platform project with an OAuth consent screen configured for an external user type and a publishing status of "Testing" is issued a refresh token expiring in 7 days."

https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2
"""

If you go to this section of that link it talks about the 7-day expiration https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2#expiration.

So at the moment, I will attempt to publish the app. For the time being, we will have to go to https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ and get a new refresh token, then update the Heroku config refresh_token variable with the new value every 7 days.

Here is the YouTubers code: https://github.com/trulymittal/gmail-api