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Friday, September 15th, 2006Friday, September 15th, 2006

Google Gmail API

by Shawn @ 3:55 pm · filed under Coding

I was just thinking... Google needs to build an API for Gmail. Then we could do things like POP our email into an email client, and then run a script from within the email client that is able to go back to Gmail and tag stuff as spam, apply a label, etc.

That would be handy... can someone please make it so? :)

UpdateOh, speaking of Gmail, it's been awhile since I poked around in it's settings, and I noticed you can now send email from within Gmail as a different address (before it would only let you set the "Reply To" address). Nice... this was a suggestion I sent to them (probably along with a lot of other people) a long time ago. Now I'll actually use their web interface for sending mail sometimes.

The other thing I noticed if you can use their SSL SMTP servers for sending email as your non-Gmail address. Double nice! :)

11 Responses to “Google Gmail API”

  1. mad4 Says:
    September 16th, 2006 at 1:31 am

    When you send a gmail to somebody with Outlook it says “From you@gmail.com on behalf of you@yoursite.com”

  2. Moof Says:
    September 16th, 2006 at 5:57 am

    Personally, I do a lot of stuff using libgmail, a python library that has reverse engineered a lot of the gmail javascript API. Amongst other things, I use it to clear messages over a certain age from my inbox, or bug me about dealing with messages in my inbox that I’ve starred for later reply, or stuff like that. It’s pretty flexible. I’ve even half-managed to get an RSS feed of a mailing list “tag” going.

    http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/

    There’s bound to be somethign similar in your scripting language of choice. If it isn’t python, then it should be ;)

    There’s one major feature I miss in google mail, and that’s the ability to flag conversations I don’t care about. I get a lot of mailing list messages, and I skim and archive them, but they keep coming back as others email into the same conversation. A one-click or one-keypress “keep this archived” option would be great.

  3. LucasMS Says:
    September 16th, 2006 at 8:07 am

    I think they wont release an API for Gmail because they are showing Ads through the web interface ….

  4. Favorite Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    Funny though, they do have an API for their calendar.

  5. David Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 1:54 pm

    From the docs:

    Note: your Gmail address will still be included in your email headers in the sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.”

    Still not good enough for professional use.

  6. Shawn Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Right…. if you want to do it “right”, you would probably want to use Gmail for your domain…

    https://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/overview.html

  7. samantha pia Says:
    October 13th, 2006 at 3:36 am

    i was banned from digitalpoint.com for defending my rights as a woman, if digitalpoint.com wants to ban me for defending female rights over islamic rights to sexually abuse children and females. then so be it.
    i’ll tell you now, i wont rest till this has been made public.

    by shawn

  8. Nelson Says:
    November 20th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    Hi guys…
    anyone else on gmail having problems ?
    gmail is fine on adsl, but on my 3g card i can surf net no problem, talk on google talk no problem, but i cannot reply to any gmail mail. also cannot compose and send attachments. can recieve mail fine.
    thought it was my beta firefox im using so tried IE but still same problem.
    sometimes can reply to a mail but not always, especially if there is an attachment in it…
    but gmail is fine on adsl so i know its not gmail themselves. 2 friends have also complained about their gmail on 3g today..

  9. The microsoft-less office (and the future of business) : Business from the inside out Says:
    May 1st, 2007 at 9:53 am

    […] I hope that Google will release a full API for it at at some point so that we can properly integrate it into our Online Business Management System, BETA. Until then, it is good to have anyway! […]

  10. Daniel Boczek Says:
    July 23rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Why do you need some special GMail API? Spam, Drafts Labels, Starred etc. are mapped to IMAP folders. So if you want add label to email you can simply perform IMAP copy to folder operation. Starring etc. is that simple too.

  11. Andrew Says:
    September 5th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    Adding labels is easy through IMAP . . .

    But, finding multiple labels on an email is hard — you have to check each email against all IMAP folders to find out all the labels. It would be nice for them to provide an easy way to get the list of labels associated with an email (without going through the webmail interface.

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