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The Gmail ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Internet E-mail (Gmail), directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Gmail folders and message data like you would a database - read, write, and send E-mails through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Natively Connect to Gmail Data in PHP


The CData ODBC driver for Gmail enables you to create PHP applications with connectivity to Gmail data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Gmail into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Gmail-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Gmail data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, you will need to register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Gmail by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password"); ... odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('test@test.com'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Subject, Size FROM Inbox");

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Subject, Size FROM Inbox"); while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){ echo $row["Subject"] . "\n"; }

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Gmail data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Inbox WHERE From = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('test@test.com')); if($success) odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Gmail-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.