If your app needs to keep up with changes in a Gmail mailbox, whether it's new mail being received or a label being added, you are likely familiar with periodically polling the Gmail API's history feed for updates. If you find this tedious, we have good news for you. Today, at Google I/O 2015, we're launching push notifications for the Gmail API.
Just subscribe to a Gmail mailbox and whenever a change occurs, the Gmail API will instantly notify your server using webhooks or another Cloud Pub/Sub API notification method. No polling required.
Check out the developers’ guide at https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/push to get started. We can’t wait to see what you build.
Posted by Eric DeFriez, Gmail Extensibility Team. As a technical lead for Gmail APIs, Eric works to make it easy for developers to build on top of Gmail.
Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Last summer, we launched the new Gmail API, giving developers more flexible, powerful, and higher-level access to programmatic email management, not to mention improved performance. Since then, it has been expanded to replace the Google Apps Admin SDK's Email Migration API (EMAPI v2). Going forward, we recommend developers integrate with the Gmail API.
EMAPI v2 will be turned down on November 1, 2015, so you should switch to the Gmail API soon. To aid you with this effort, we've put together a developer’s guide to help you migrate from EMAPI v2 to the Gmail API. Before you do that, here’s your final reminder to not forget about these deprecations including EMAPI v1, which are coming even sooner (April 20, 2015).
We launched Actions in the Inbox at Google I/O 2013 as a quick way for users to get things done directly from Gmail. Integrating with this technology only requires adding some markup to an email to define what the message is about and what actions the user can perform.
We support a variety of action types covering common scenarios such as adding a movie to a queue, product reviews, or other even pre-defined requests. Especially popular with senders is the One-Click Action to validate a user’s email address, as shown below:
If you are using Mandrill, the email infrastructure service from MailChimp, writing a Python app to send one of those emails, only takes a few lines of code! Take a look at this example:
import mandrill # Replace with your own values API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY' FROM_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS' TO_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_TO_ADDRESS' SUBJECT = 'Please validate your email address' HTML_CONTENT = """ <html> <body> <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "EmailMessage", "action": { "@type": "ConfirmAction", "name": "Confirm Registration", "handler": { "@type": "HttpActionHandler", "url": "https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123" } } } </script> <p>Please click on this link to validate your email address:</p> <p><a href="https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123">https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123</a></p> </body> </html> """ # Instantiate the Mandrill client with your API Key mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill(API_KEY) message = { 'html': HTML_CONTENT, 'subject': SUBJECT, 'from_email': FROM_ADDRESS, 'to': [{'email': TO_ADDRESS}], } result = mandrill_client.messages.send(message=message)
To run this app, just replace the API key with the credentials from your Mandrill account and configure the sender and recipient addresses. You should also edit the HTML content to provide your action handler URL, and customize the messaging if you want.
You can use Actions in the Inbox to reduce the friction and increase the conversion rate. Please note that you are not limited to validating email addresses: you can also review products and services, reply to event invitations, and much more.
For more information, please visit our documentation at https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions. You can also ask questions on Stack Overflow, with the tag google-schemas.
Search engines have been using structured data for years to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results. Today, we are introducing schemas in emails to make messages more interactive and allow developers to deliver a slice of their apps to users’ inboxes.
Schemas in emails can be used to represent various types of entities and actions. Email clients that understand schemas, such as Gmail, can render entities and actions defined in the messages with a consistent user interface. In the case of Gmail, this means that the emails can display quick action buttons that let users take actions directly from their inboxes, as in the following screenshot:
Using schemas to add quick action buttons to the emails you send is easy. All it takes is adding some markup to your HTML emails, together with your regular content, in one of the supported formats - Microdata and JSON-LD.
As an example, the following JSON-LD markup can be used to define a movie and the corresponding one-click action to add the movie to your queue:
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "schema.org", "@type": "Movie", "name": "The Internship", ... information about the movie ... "action": { "@type": "ConfirmAction", "name": "Add to queue", "actionHandler": { "@type": "HttpActionHandler", "url": "https://my-movies.com/add?movieId=123", "method": "POST", } } } </script>
Gmail renders the markup above with a button labelled “Add to queue” next to the email subject line. When the user clicks on the button, Gmail sends a POST request to the url specified in the action handler. Your app has to handle these requests and respond to the email client with an appropriate HTTP response code (200 for successful requests, 400 for invalid requests, etc.).
Schemas in emails currently support four different types of actions - rate/review, RSVP, one-click action and goto link - and we plan to add more types moving forward. We are collaborating with a number of partners who will launch their integrations in the coming weeks, making the messages they send more useful and interactive for Gmail users. For example, Esna is using this to inform users of missed calls and provide them with a one-click button to be called again, while Seamless is implementing the rate/review action to collect feedback about restaurants.
Other partners who are already implementing schemas in email today include both Billguard, Concur Technologies, Docusign, HelloSign, Insight.ly, Mailchimp, myERP, Netflix, OpenTable, Orangescape, Paperless Post, Spotify, SugarCRM, and Tripit.
To learn more about all supported entities and actions and to find out how to get started with schemas in email, visit http://developers.google.com/gmail.
Gmail servers support the standard IMAP and POP protocols for email retrieval but sometimes you only need to know whether there are any new messages in your inbox. Using any of the two protocols mentioned above may seem like an overkill in this scenario and that’s why Gmail also exposes a read only feed called Gmail Inbox Feed which you can subscribe to and get the list of unread messages in your inbox.
The Gmail Inbox Feed is easily accessible by pointing your browser to https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom and authenticating with your username and password if you are not already logged in.
Using basic authentication to access the inbox feed doesn’t provide a very good user experience if we want delegated access. In that case, we should instead rely on the OAuth authorization standard, which is fully supported by the Gmail Inbox Feed.
OAuth supports two different flows. With 3-legged OAuth, an user can give access to a resource he owns to a third-party application without sharing his credentials. The 2-legged flow, instead, resembles a client-server scenario where the application is granted domain-wide access to a resource.
Let’s write a .NET application that uses 2-legged OAuth to access the Gmail Inbox Feed for a user in the domain and list unread emails. This authorization mechanism also suits Google Apps Marketplace developers who want to add inbox notifications to their applications.
There is no dedicated client library for this task and the Inbox Feed is not based on the Google Data API protocol but we’ll still use the .NET library for Google Data APIs for its OAuth implementation.
First, create a new C# project and add a reference to the Google.GData.Client.dll released with the client library. Then add the following using directives to your code:
using System; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Linq; using Google.GData.Client;
The next step is to use 2-legged OAuth to send an authorized GET request to the feed URL. In order to do this, we need our domain’s consumer key and secret and the username of the user account we want to access the inbox feed for.
string CONSUMER_KEY = "mydomain.com"; string CONSUMER_SECRET = "my_consumer_secret"; string TARGET_USER = "test_user"; OAuth2LeggedAuthenticator auth = new OAuth2LeggedAuthenticator("GmailFeedReader", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, TARGET_USER, CONSUMER_KEY); HttpWebRequest request = auth.CreateHttpWebRequest("GET", new Uri("https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/")); HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;
The response is going to be a standard Atom 0.3 feed, i.e. an xml document that we can load into an XDocument using the standard XmlReader class:
XDocument
XmlReader
XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(response.GetResponseStream()); XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(reader); XNamespace xmlns = "http://purl.org/atom/ns#";
All the parsing can be done with a single LINQ to XML instruction, which iterates the entries and instantiates a new MailMessage object for each email, setting its Subject, Body and From properties with the corresponding values in the feed:
MailMessage
Subject
Body
From
var messages = from entry in xdoc.Descendants(xmlns + "entry") from author in entry.Descendants(xmlns + "author") select new MailMessage() { Subject = entry.Element(xmlns + "title").Value, Body = entry.Element(xmlns + "summary").Value, From = new MailAddress( author.Element(xmlns + "email").Value, author.Element(xmlns + "name").Value) };
At this point, messages will contain a collection of MailMessage instances that we can process or simply dump to the console as in the following snippet:
Console.WriteLine("Number of messages: " + messages.Count()); foreach (MailMessage entry in messages) { Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("Subject: " + entry.Subject); Console.WriteLine("Summary: " + entry.Body); Console.WriteLine("Author: " + entry.From); }
If you have any questions about how to use the Google Data APIs .NET Client Library to access the Gmail Inbox Feed, please post them in the client library discussion group.
var MARK_UNREAD = false; var ADD_UNSNOOZED_LABEL = false;
setup()
function getLabelName(i) { return "Snooze/Snooze " + i + " days"; } function setup() { // Create the labels we’ll need for snoozing GmailApp.createLabel("Snooze"); for (var i = 1; i <= 7; ++i) { GmailApp.createLabel(getLabelName(i)); } if (ADD_UNSNOOZED_LABEL) { GmailApp.createLabel("Unsnoozed"); } }
function moveSnoozes() { var oldLabel, newLabel, page; for (var i = 1; i <= 7; ++i) { newLabel = oldLabel; oldLabel = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName(getLabelName(i)); page = null; // Get threads in "pages" of 100 at a time while(!page || page.length == 100) { page = oldLabel.getThreads(0, 100); if (page.length > 0) { if (newLabel) { // Move the threads into "today’s" label newLabel.addToThreads(page); } else { // Unless it’s time to unsnooze it GmailApp.moveThreadsToInbox(page); if (MARK_UNREAD) { GmailApp.markThreadsUnread(page); } if (ADD_UNSNOOZED_LABEL) { GmailApp.getUserLabelByName("Unsnoozed") .addToThreads(page); } } // Move the threads out of "yesterday’s" label oldLabel.removeFromThreads(page); } } } }
GmailApp
GmailApp.search()
DocumentApp
DocsList.find()
File.getId()
Document.saveAndClose()
Posted by Corey Goldfeder, Google Apps Script Team
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Dan Holevoet, Google Developer Team
Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Marketplace Team
01 LOGIN username@googlemail.com P4$$w0rd
01 AUTHENTICATE XOAUTH R0VUIGh0dHBzOi8vbWFpbC5nb29nbGUuY29tL21haWwvYi91c2VybmFtZUBnb29nbGVtYWlsLmNvbS9pbWFwLyBvYXV0aF9jb25zdW1lcl9rZXk9ImFub255bW91cyIsb2F1dGhfbm9uY2U9IjEzMDQwNzM0Nzc4MTA1MDA2NTQzIixvYXV0aF9zaWduYXR1cmU9ImNhdWdodHlvdXBlZWtpbmciLG9hdXRoX3NpZ25hdHVyZV9tZXRob2Q9IkhNQUMtU0hBMSIsb2F1dGhfdGltZXN0YW1wPSIxMjY5Mzc3NzU5IixvYXV0aF90b2tlbj0ibm90cmVhbGx5IixvYXV0aF92ZXJzaW9uPSIxLjAiCg==
