What is it?
Gmail is one of free web mail services, provided by Google. And to be precise, this is basic gmail functionality. On the other hand, registering in gmail, by default creates for you an account in google+, which allows you to do much more. But to focus on programmatic case, let’s talk about web mail service only.
To be precise, this one:
https://developers.google.com/gmail/api
Who is using it?
Gmail is used worldwide by great number of people. And we are not talking only on personal accounts, but also enterprise solutions. For example, you can connect your company email (yourname@yourdomain.com) and use it from gmail platform.
What are the benefits?
- As many of google APIs, have very good support with nice app to extend its functionalities.
- It is used by many people, so operates on multiple data. So it’s not very likely to receive a message that is not readable on gmail.
- No advertisement, which is the most awesome functionality, spam filters works extremely well.
- Great search – it might be considered as less important, until you won’t be able to find some important email on smaller web mail provider.
- Good API, that allows you to build your application based on user mailbox directly.
What are the risks?
I honestly can’t find any risk of using Gmail.
Use cases
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- You can fetch emails directly from your users mailboxes. Off course after proper authentication. You can do it automatically and periodically. You can filter them as you were using standard search field based in gmail.
So for example you can build a service, that gets all the flight tickets bought by your user, and provide new travel recommendations, based on this data and grab affiliate commissions from each booked flight. - You can send emails in the name of your user. This one should be done delicately, because standard gmail account have restrictions about how many emails can be sent in particular time. But still, when you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars per month on email sending software, you can build your own.
- You can build a plugin to Gmail, that will inform you if your message have been read. Like in old small web mail providers, when you can check ‘inform me if read’
- You can fetch emails directly from your users mailboxes. Off course after proper authentication. You can do it automatically and periodically. You can filter them as you were using standard search field based in gmail.
What can we do for you?
We’ve done more or less everything what you can see in our use cases (off course exact projects were slightly different, but the functionalities were similar).
We know Gmail Rest API and we are happy to build applications on top of it. If you need to extend standard email functionalities, or have in mind your own application what will use it, contact us, we are here to help.
Another field is email automation, if you want to process some type of email in a special way, we can help.
Reading and parsing invoices from certain client or supplier, converting it to your invoices software or copy data to another place is also possible. Such actions can speed up your business, or take big amount of repetitive actions from you.
If you have some questions or another cool idea to use gmail API, let us know.