Version 2.0 of the Context.IO API has taken us to a new level of connectivity with the mailbox. We’ve made it easier than ever to connect your user’s email account to your application and securely leverage email data in your app.
We’ve Done the Dirty Work!
While you can create accounts and connect mailboxes through direct API calls (see here and here), we now provide a much quicker way to let users connect their mailboxes to your application: “connect_tokens”.
Here’s the sequence of how connect tokens work:
Simplify OAuth when Connecting to Gmail/Google Apps Mailboxes
When it comes to Gmail and Google Apps, OAuth access integration typically involves the following tedious and often lengthy development steps:
- making a connection
- getting a request token
- an access token then redirects the user for granting access
- creating the account and source with those values to make it accessible under your Context.IO API key.
Connect tokens simplify this tedious process by handling the OAuth token request for your app. You can even use your own Google consumer key if you want to make sure users grant access to your app explicitly instead of api.context.io.
See connect tokens in Action
The ContactLoop is a Chrome extension we built as a demo app that allows you to immediately pull out conversations with any of your contacts mentioned on any web page – great for CRMs or social profiles. It uses connect tokens to setup individual accounts. You can install it from here: http://contactloop.co. Once the extension is installed, clicking on the Context.IO envelope logo on the upper right of your browser window will initiate the account creation process much like it could be integrated withing your app.
That’s it! Connect tokens makes it easy to connect new mailboxes to your app and saves you a ton of development time! We see this feature opening up our API to all kinds of public facing applications. Try it out in your app and let us know about it at sarah-jane@context.io… we’ll be happy to feature you in our upcoming app showcase!
Psst… did you know v2.0 of our API is actually already in public beta? We haven’t made a lot of noise about this as we allow our existing devs to play with 2.0 while we prepare to come out of beta (very soon)… but we figure if you’ve made it this far into the blog post, you should know about it too! Signup today (if you haven’t already) and get started playing with all of our cool new features!
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