Mobile By Ryan Whitwam Jun. 26, 2014 9:30 am
Until now, the only way to use all the features of Gmail was to use the Gmail page in a browser or one of the official apps. That’s about to change with the announcement of the Gmail API at Google I/O. It’s free to use, and is available today as a beta. You might not be tinkering with it yourself, but you ought to hope your friendly neighborhood developer does.
If you add a Gmail account to any third-party client like Mailbox or the default Apple mail app, you’re accessing Gmail over IMAP. That’s fine — IMAP supports all the basic email things, but it hasn’t changed much since the late 90s. Gmail has moved far beyond what IMAP was designed to handle.
Google’s Gmail API will give email clients access to labels, threading, drafts, and adds very specific permissions. For example, if an app only needs permission to read messages instead of send them, it can simply request read-only through the API. It’s not just about email clients, but an entire universe of apps that use Gmail data for other purposes.
The Gmail API is going to be much faster than IMAP for all operations, and will include full search capabilities, just like the Gmail search bar. That means you can include operators and filters in your queries. Basically, the apps on your phone and computer that connect to Gmail are going to get a lot smarter and faster very soon. Unleashing developers like this also has the potential to deliver cool new services utilizing the Gmail API that Google itself never thought of. It might be developer news, but it’s good news for all of us.
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If you add a Gmail account to any third-party client like Mailbox or the default Apple mail app, you’re accessing Gmail over IMAP. That’s fine — IMAP supports all the basic email things, but it hasn’t changed much since the late 90s. Gmail has moved far beyond what IMAP was designed to handle.
Google’s Gmail API will give email clients access to labels, threading, drafts, and adds very specific permissions. For example, if an app only needs permission to read messages instead of send them, it can simply request read-only through the API. It’s not just about email clients, but an entire universe of apps that use Gmail data for other purposes.
The Gmail API is going to be much faster than IMAP for all operations, and will include full search capabilities, just like the Gmail search bar. That means you can include operators and filters in your queries. Basically, the apps on your phone and computer that connect to Gmail are going to get a lot smarter and faster very soon. Unleashing developers like this also has the potential to deliver cool new services utilizing the Gmail API that Google itself never thought of. It might be developer news, but it’s good news for all of us.
More...
