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Accessing Gmail with oAuth authorization in PHP

Recently, I’ve joined a project that required accessing Gmail accounts using oAuth authentication with PHP. It turns out, that’s not such a very simple thing to do, especially with PHP - Zend has a very nice implementation for it, but the wiki page is terribly old and outdated… I’ve lost a few hours looking for a nice and clean solution and found a “handmadeimap” project done by Pete Warder some time ago. Bad thing is, the latest commit was done in 2010. The good thing: not much has changed since then, so the code works perfectly. It’s even better to use that php-imap extension, as you need to use raw IMAP commands, which gives you the chance to use, for example, gmail’s special X-GM-RAW extension to SEARCH command.