last movement of Gmail is not the end of the email, it is a new beginning

last movement of Gmail is not the end of the email, it is a new beginning ,

Everyone loves to hate email.

is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and perhaps most important, not the context, we've come to expect from modern communication applications. It's hard to blame email, however, since most of the applications we use to manage it can communicate via IMAP, an age-old standard that is slow and difficult to work. When Google announced its API Gmail it a few weeks ago, it seemed that we finally could get an answer to the question that we all ask: When is email will start to work like the rest of our applications

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When email will start to work like the rest of our applications?

Google announced that any application can now talk to Gmail using today's fastest languages, more modern - languages ​​that every web developer speaks. The Gmail API, you can ask Google for topics, messages, drafts, and labels from three to ten times faster than IMAP, Google says - but the company says it should not be used to replace IMAP. There are two reasons for this: first, the Gmail API can not provide push notifications (again), and secondly, there are limits on the number of API requests that you can make a day, which could cause problems for people with large inboxes.

What it can do is to provide an interface for any application to interact on a small scale with your Gmail account without having to create a mail client. When this happens, Google will not replace email - it will actually expanded it. Instead of killing email as some hoped, the API Gmail email gives a new life.

With Gmail API in hand, it is finally possible to create applications that live -Dessus mail without spending weeks or months on them. "Google's intention is really to electrical applications and services that use email data, but do not try to be mail clients. That is its own emerging category of email applications," said Javier Soltero, founder of Acompli mail app. "with IMAP this is cumbersome and requires you to learn more about email that you really want, unless you build a mail client," he said. "Navigation API of this structure is much easier to follow." Clearly, instead of having to deal with the construction of an IMAP-synchronization engine to access a mailbox, you may only need to query the Google server for a search term or a specific email address.

Michael Koziarski, one of the creators of the app Sorting email management, said using the API could have saved his team a month of development time, but would have limited compatibility with other services . "The obvious disadvantage is that the support of the Gmail API is 100 percent compatible with other email provider out there," he said. "If we start again today, we would almost certainly use the Gmail API and drop support for other email providers." Even for updating existing applications, the API might be useful. Pierre Valade, calendar app co-creator of Sunrise, says his team could quickly whip up a service for scanning Gmail users' inboxes flight emails and auto-add them to your calendar, or showing recent emails with a specific event participant.

"Google's intention is really to electrical applications and services that use email data, but do not try to be email clients."

"I think the innovation will come from developers having to spend much less time struggling with IMAP for relatively simple things - we will all be able to spend much more time on the features we want to add, "said Aye Moah, product manager at Baydin, which makes managing email Boomerang. Moah application and his team already integrated Gmail API and saw an immediate increase in the performance of their application.

with Gmail API, Google is to start treating Gmail more as a platform and less like a server . mail Soltero said that if developers are receptive, Google is likely to expand the capabilities of its API to do much more There is a big not important -. our email accounts contain so much valuable information that until now has been available only by mail clients and those who know IMAP. Now, access to Gmail data such as contacts, email messages and even send is accessible to all -. Assuming that you have given them permission pursuant to integrate with Gmail

"You do not get to call you a platform. You earn the right to be called a platform . "

And as for better, faster messaging clients, we are not totally out of luck. Postbox for Mac, which recently launched in beta, offers a vision of how email might feel if not bound by age-old technologies. Within two seconds of signing into the application, each unique email loaded into my inbox. Instead of functioning as an IMAP client as Sparrow full or Apple Mail, upload all your email to manage locally, the mailbox is the interface to your messages in the cloud. Once you overlay a fast service on top of the email, it's easy to forget that you are dealing with e-mails at all. Applications like mailbox and Acompli, perhaps paired with some of the smaller net tools (such as sorting) built with Gmail API could offer some consolation to the seemingly eternal nature of email.

The virtue of email is that it is interoperable, after all, contrary to the standards of most communication applications we use today. But adding more exclusive features to Gmail could create more lock-in. "You do not get to call you a platform. You earn the right to be called a platform," said Soltero. Gmail, he said, is an incredible platform that has so far been only accessible by a small number. This could mean that we will start to see a whole new range of applications of electronic mail to let us interact with huge deposits of business and personal e-mails we had more time we used a network social.

the Gmail API will not be enough to make you love your e-mail, but it might help you to hate a little less. with email, the most ubiquitous form of electronic communication even that apparently small victory could prove to be a big one.