It’s been just over four months since Context.IO 2.0 came out of beta, and since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback. Over the past 2 to 3 months, we’ve been rolling out enhancements based on that feedback and wanted to give you a quick summary of what’s new. Changes include:

- Better control over folders
- For apps that require the most up-to-date mailbox data, we’ve added direct access to IMAP servers for certain calls.
- The ability to create time-limited direct links to attachments
- Creating an account and a source in a single call, saving time and making error handling easier
- Getting the raw list of attachments for messages
- Pull the bodies, flags and headers for your messages in a single call
- Total number of messages and files now exposed when adding a new account.

Here’s a bit more info about each addition we’ve made:

New Folders Resource

While the list of folders is part of the metadata returned for messages, this resource gives you better control of those. The GET method will give you a list of folders a specific message is listed under, POST will let you add or remove folders and PUT allows you to overwrite the list of folders a message is in with a new set.

This can be great for productivity apps that are building task lists based on messages in specific folders, and once done, posting the completed task to a new folder. It can also be used to move messages with attachments into a specific folder, to sync with a third party storage tool, as in the case of emailtobox.com.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/messages/folders

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Fetching Messages Straight from the Server

While you can already pull message data with the messages resource, we added a way to pull a list of messages straight from the IMAP server. Before responding, this call checks the IMAP server directly for any new messages and will add them to the response. This way, your list of messages reflects exactly whats on the IMAP server the moment the call is made versus the last time Context.IO synced with it.

For any apps that require the most up-to-date list of messages from a specific folder as possible and can tolerate the performance hit caused by connecting to the IMAP server, this call is for you.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/sources/folders/messages

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Deep Links to Individual Attachments from your App

Letting users download individual attachments from your app involved that attachment going through your server before you send it back to the browser. To skip that hop, you can now generate a time-limited link to an attachment and redirect the user to that link.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/files/content#get

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Create an Account and a Source in a Single Call

Use this call to not only create an account and a source in a single call, but to ease up any error handling: if the source parameters aren’t valid or don’t map to an existing and accessible mailbox, the account isn’t created and the call returns an error code.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts#post

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Get the Raw Attachments List

We automatically filter out files like signature images or winmail.dat files from the files list. If you need the raw list of files and that filtering is causing you more trouble than anything else, you can now turn it off by setting the raw_file_list parameter to 1 when creating sources.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/sources#post

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Callback Notification when the Initial Indexing is Complete

Find out when your apps’ mailboxes are ready to go! When you add a source, you can now specify a callback URL and we’ll make a POST request to it when the initial sync is complete.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/sources#post

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Get the Body, Flags and Headers of a Message in a Single Call

Message bodies, flags and headers are all available as separate resources that used to require separate API calls each requiring IMAP connections and the related overhead. You can now set any combination of include_body, include_flags and include_headers to 1 as GET parameters to obtain that data in a single call to a message instance.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/messages#id-get

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Obtain Up-to-date Count of Unread Messages in Folders

Use the optional include_extended_counts paramater to pull the number of unread messages for a specific folder directly from the IMAP server, giving your app the most up to date information.

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/sources/folders#get

Number of Messages and Files Now Exposed as Property of an Account

When listing properties of an account, we now include the total number of messages and files contained within the account, by default. This allows you to do cool things like sort mailboxes by size!

See docs for more details: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts#get

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We’re always looking for ways to optimize access to rich email data and make it easier for developers to build killer apps on top of it. What do you think about these new calls and API changes? What are some of the ways they’ll improve your app, or do they give you any new ideas for apps you didn’t think were possible before?

We’ve just returned from lovely Toronto and are still pumped about our weekend at #HackTO! The event itself was a huge success. 100 developers in attendance, 23 completed apps (a record for any HackDays event) and $7000 in awarded prizes. Amazing! We were extremely impressed with all the apps that were built on Saturday. Our fellow sponsors Twilio, FreshBooks, Shopify, TrendSpottr, SoundCloud, TinEye, and YellowAPI were great to work alongside with, and we were super impressed with some of the integrations that were built with these awesome APIs! Of course, there can only be one winner, and we were thrilled that “LastResort”, a Twilio and Context.IO mashup, took the top prize! (And, it didn’t hurt that the amazing Leila Boujnane, the founder of HackDays, brought her sweet Zazie to be official #HackTO greeter:)

LastResort monitors your existing email stream (via Context.IO) for critical issues and calls the appropriate support people (via Twilio) to fix them as they arise. The team leveraged our webhooks to handle the email monitoring component of the app, and used a fictional server error to demonstrate the power of their hack. In real time, they were able to demo an email with the subject line “server down” coming into the inbox, and triggering a call to a tech support person. Cooler still, the app keeps calling a priority list of support people until someone answers/accepts the responsibility to fix the problem.

Ian Ha, Scott Hyndman and Victor Mota, who built the app, work together (although Victor’s internship recently ended) at a company called BluTrumpet, a monetization and distribution platform for mobile apps based in Toronto. As Ian Ha explains in his great post about the day’s events, “we all like and respect each other and know our strengths and weaknesses. We also have the added benefit of being candid and critical and there was plenty of healthy discussions throughout the day. We were constantly talking with each other, pair programming at times, pitching to help whenever. “Hey, what do you guys think of this? How does this look?” was a common phrase. We were constantly checking in on each other.”

The app itself won because of its utility, demonstrable functionality, and great presentation at the end of the day. It didn’t hurt that the LastResort team chose to use not one, but two of the sponsoring APIs, and married them in such a cool way! Here’s Leila and the winning team in their crowning moment. Scott’s enjoying a hard earned sip of ale:

We’re such big fans of Twilio, so seeing another Context.IO/Twilio mashup win a HackDays event was a pleasure (remember last summer’s HackVAN?) What other possibilities do you think exist for Context.IO and Twilio? What other kinds of calls and texts can you see triggered based on incoming email content? There’s also the option of displaying emails based on incoming calls, as last August’s HackVAN winner Ross showed us! What other ways can we mash up these  deeply entrenched modes of communication? Let us know!

And stay tuned for more news about the upcoming and inevitably COMPLETELY awesome #HackMTL event in June that we will be playing a big part in helping to organize! How could we not? Montreal + June + HackDays = pretty much the best thing ever. Get psyched.

We are so excited to head down to Toronto this weekend for #HackTO! We had an awesome time last summer at Hackdays Vancouver, and when Leila asked us if we were interested in participating in Toronto’s event, we didn’t give it a second thought!

We’re psyched to demo our API alongside our friends at YellowAPI, Shopify, Freshbooks, TinEye, Klick Health, GoBooks, Atomic Reach, SoundCloud and Twilio!

And… we’ll be hooking up the team that builds the best hack on Context.IO with a $150 itunes card! SWEET!

There are still a few spots left… sign up ASAP! http://guestlistapp.com/events/87969

Re-posted with permission from the Box Developer Blog

This post comes from Bruno Morency, President of Context.IO, the missing email API that makes it easy and fast to integrate your user’s email data in your application. This application and walkthrough are designed to give you insight into the basics of what you can do by combining Context.IO and the Box platform. When you’re done reading, go check out Context.IO!

We all know managing files in Box is a breeze, but the reality is most of us continue to exchange important files and messages via email. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to easily manage and sync all the files locked in email with your Box account? Enter Context.IO, the API that makes developing applications that use email data fast and easy.

We built EmailToBox.com as a showcase of how the Context.IO API can be used to easily integrate email data with Box. The concept of this app is pretty simple:

1. Upon signup, the app creates an “EmailToBox” folder in the user’s email account and Box account (for Gmail, it creates an “EmailToBox” label),
2. When users drag an email message to their new “EmailToBox” folder, the app will upload its attachments to the “EmailToBox” folder in their Box account.

In this post, we’ll go over the code behind the key functionality of this application:

• Connecting to the user’s mailbox
• Setting up a special tracked folder in the user’s mailbox
• Uploading files attached to messages placed in that special folder to Box

Connecting User Accounts

The first step is to handle registration of new users. To create an account on EmailToBox, new users first login their existing Box accounts so we can get an auth_token for it. The next step is to connect to the mailbox through Context.IO.

To handle that, we’ll use the connect_tokens functionality which handles the user workflow and redirects users to our app once the mailbox is connected to our Context.IO API key. Let’s see how this works:
If you want full control over the user experience to connect mailboxes, you can use direct API calls instead of a connect_token. The relevant calls are http://context.io/docs/latest/accounts#post to create a new account that matches our own users and then http://context.io/docs/latest/accounts/sources#post to add a source to that account for the user’s mailbox.

Creating the Special “EmailToBox” Tracked Folder

Now that we have a user connected to a Box account and an email account, the next step is to create the “EmailToBox” folders in both services. We create the folder in the Box account using the create_folder function. To create the folder in the email account, we’ll use the Folders resourceof Context.IO as follows:

Just like that, the new folder has been created. The last step of the user setup is to monitor that folder for new messages placed in it. To do so, we simply use the Context.IO WebHooks with the filter_folder_added option. With this webhook functionality, all we need to do is define an event we want to track in the mailbox and tell Context.IO which URL to call on our app when it happens. Here’s how we set it up:
That’s it! We now have a complete user setup and our app will be notified when a new message is placed in the EmailToBox folder we created for that user.

Processing WebHook Callback

The last remaining piece is to handle the callback that Context.IO will make to our application when emails are placed by users in their EmailToBox folder. That callback is an HTTP POST call and the request body is a JSON object containing metadata about the message for which the webhook has been triggered. The exact format of that JSON object can be found here: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/webhooks#callbacks. Let’s see how we handle these POST requests in our app:

Since the callback URL our app exposes to receive these callbacks needs to be accessible without any sessions or authentication, there must be a way to verify that the request is legitimate. This is what the signature, timestamp and token properties in the request body are for. This signature is the HMAC-SHA256 hash of the string formed by concatenating the timestamp and token properties using your Context.IO consumer secret as the hashing key. The last part in the code above recalculates that hash and makes sure it matches the one given in the request body. You can further increase security by rejecting any request with a timestamp older than a couple of minutes and making sure the same token isn’t used twice within that allowed time period. If you do so, we strongly recommend setting up NTP on your server to make sure your clock isn’t drifting too far. Now that we validated the callback request, the actual processing begins. First, we check if the message has any attachments, then we’ll upload them to the appropriate Box account:

Once we verified the emails have at least one attachment, the first thing we do is download the message body. Then, we loop through the attachments, download them from the mailbox and upload them to Box. Finally, after the upload is complete, we add the message body as a comment on the file we just uploaded.

Conclusion

As you can see, this app was really quite simple and very light on code, but in the end we built something very useful. While the examples above are really taken from the code running http://emailtobox.com, they have been trimmed down to make them simpler to read. We encourage you to explore and use the complete source code available in Context.IO’s GitHub profile: https://github.com/ContextIO/EmailToBox.

What do you think you can build with email? With all of the rich data being exchanged by email on a daily basis, we see email as a rich treasure trove of information just waiting to be leveraged in applications. We have CRM solutions, productivity tools, and of course, document management apps using us in pretty cool ways. We’d love to get some ideas on what you want to build – get in touch with us!

References

Context.IO API documentation: http://context.io/docs/latest
Get a free Context.IO API key: http://context.io/#signup
API Explorer: https://console.context.io/#explore
Context.IO on GitHub: https://github.com/ContextIO

Streak, a Y Combinator grad, recently got a bunch of great press about their CRM for Gmail. We’re big fans of Streak, not only because they’re powered by Context.IO, but because they are helping us manage our workflow through Gmail. I, for one, have significantly reduced my incessant switching back and forth between my CRM to Gmail because of it!

Their CRM resides as a layer on top of Gmail that helps users organize contacts into pipelines, and provides an awesome UI that plays very nicely with gmail:

We caught up with Aleem Mawani, one of Streak’s cofounders, to talk more about the problem Context.IO is solving for them.

SJM: How is Streak leveraging Context.IO?

Aleem: We use Streak to enable sharing of emails across a team or organization. For example, if I want to see an email between a teammate and one of our customers, Streak uses contextIO to show me that message even if its not in my inbox. No more forwarding emails.

SJM: How has your experience been building on Context.IO? What would you say to developers debating whether they should build and manage their own IMAP connection or work with Context.IO?

Aleem: Thank god, no. Do you really want to learn how the intricacies of IMAP work? We didn’t – we’re focusing on the stuff we do well.

Keep Streak on your radar. They have a ton of cool features in the pipeline, and while they are directly attacking the CRM market, their feature set has attracted a wide variety of use cases – from event organization to staying on top of communications with family and friends.

Streak, an app that integrates with Gmail, adds all kinds of cool functionality to your inbox. Save snippets of text, schedule your sending times, manage events and more, all within Gmail. Streak was founded by friendly Canadians Aleem Mawani and Omar Ismail and recently graduated from Y Combinator.

Streak connects with IMAP via Context.IO, and we’re thrilled to see all the press they’ve been getting lately. Yesterday, they were featured on TechCrunch and today they were covered by Lifehacker.

We’re putting together an interview with Aleem and Omar that will reveal just how much Context.IO eased the development process for Streak. Stay tuned!

This weekend, Context.IO brought down 15 hackers, designers and biz dev specialists from Montreal (and Ottawa!) to Boston to participate in AngelHack!

The teams pivoted, iterated and reiterated down to the last possible moment. And Montreal came out winning! Four of our teams made into the East coast Top 20,  and two teams; MD Share and LuckSpark, were included in the East Cost top 10 teams! LuckSpark got an extra special nod from Facebook by winning best use of their API, on either East coast or West! Here are a few shots of our Montreal teams in action:

This first shot is from last week’s Startup Drinks Montreal, where some of  us got together to brainstorm before Friday morning’s departure:

From left to right: SJ (me! in the turquoise top), Marc Beaupre from Startupifier, Joyce Lam, Vlad Sedach, Alfred and Rex from AdCNX, a little bit of Marie-Helene Halle's and Cheryl Tom's heads, and Philippe Demers

Our Context.IO t-shirts were a hit…

Here’s one of team LuckSpark (name subject to change!), selected for the Facebook API award:

L to R: Cheryl, Philippe, Marie-Helene, Cordis and Joyce

MD Share, one of the East coast top 10, present to the judges on Sunday night:

Team Ottawa joined forces with some Harvard psychiatrists to build “Psyri,” an app to help manage client/doctor relationships for depressed patients:

Thanks to all the awesome Montreal/Ottawa teams that came down! We had an awesome time with you all… see you at the next hackathon!

Official registration for our road trip to Boston this weekend (departing Friday March 2nd) is now open!

REGISTER HERE:

http://angelhackmtltoboston.eventbrite.com/

REGISTRATION CLOSES TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28th AT 8 PM EST!

What’s this roadtrip all about? Want to show our American friends what the Montreal startup scene is made of?

Context.IO has been invited to bring down a bunch of Montreal hackers/designers/product/biz dev/amazing people to Boston for a one of the most prolific hackathons in North America.

http://angelhack.com/

WHAT IS ANGELHACK?

AngelHack brings together startup communities from around the country for a hackathon competition, judged by top Angel Investors, where participants build startup ideas. The only rule is all code must be fresh, so that everyone has a fair chance. Build your startup at AngelHack, win prizes, national recognition, and validation from Angel Investors on what they think of your ideas.

ANGELHACK 2.0

AngelHack 2 focuses on the startup communities in Boston and San Francisco and has over $75k in prizes to win. They are estimating over over 600 participants for the March 3-4th event.

If you’re interested, your registration fee will be waived. Friday night accommodations will also be your responsibility, but Context.IO will work to get a great group deal at a hotel nearby, or you can crash with a friend in Boston, if you have any. Keep in mind that Saturday night would be all hacking, so accommodations will only be required on Friday night. We’ll ride in Friday evening and take the bus back overnight on Sunday. Red eye FTW.

This is an incredible opportunity for the Montreal Startup Scene. Being selected as a finalist or winner at this event would mean considerable press and visibility to some of the most high profile VCs in North America. Imagine Montreal took everyone by surprise with a win here? Let’s show them what we’re capable of!

Brainstorm in the car, build in Boston, be totally awesome. This is not a weekend you should miss.

And we’ll be meeting Wednesday evening at Startup Drinks/Brutopia to discuss logistics. Details in link above.

We’ll try to sneak in a quick pub crawl around Boston on Friday night too !

http://angelhackmtltoboston.eventbrite.com/

You may have recently read a TechCrunch and/or Mashable article about Contactually, the CRM tool that allows you to stay connected with your contacts without leaving your mailbox. Looks like this sleekly integrated CRM/Email concept is resonating with audiences – they’ve just graduated from 500 Startups and they’re  getting all kinds of press coverage and handling a huge amount of invite requests.

We’re big fans of this startup and have been in talks with Zvi Band, Contactually’s founder, and the rest of his team, for several months now.

Zvi stumbled across Context.IO in August and signed up to take a look under the hood. Although he had already built out a preliminary  Gmail layer for Contactually, Zvi reached out to discuss our take on email as a data source and what our plans as a company were. In a stroke of luck, our roadmap looked like it was going to solve several of the issues Zvi anticipated facing with Contactually over the coming months.

We initially connected with the Contactually team in August, when v2.0 of our API was still in beta. At that time, Zvi was concerned about the scalability, reliability and speed of his existing Gmail layer for Contactually, and these were precisely the issues we were looking at strengthening with v2.0 of the Context.IO API. Down the road, Zvi is looking to expand into use cases outside of IMAP to cover a broader segment of business mailboxes. The next big item on Context.IO’s roadmap is Exchange support, which will allow a large segment of enterprise mailboxes to be integrated into business applications. The partnership became obvious, and we’ve been working together ever since.

Instead of continuing to build directly on IMAP, Contactually saved days of precious development time while working around the clock to prepare for 500 Startups demo day. We can’t wait to see what’s next for this awesome team!

Interested in hopping on a bus to Boston on the weekend of March 2-4 for AngelHack and showing our American friends what the Montreal startup scene is made of?

Context.IO has been invited to fill a bus with at least 30 Montreal hackers/designers/product/biz dev/amazing people and bring them down to Boston for a one of the most prolific hackathons in North America.

http://angelhack.com/

WHAT IS ANGELHACK?

AngelHack brings together startup communities from around the country for a hackathon competition, judged by top Angel Investors, where participants build startup ideas. The only rule is all code must be fresh, so that everyone has a fair chance. Build your startup at AngelHack, win prizes, national recognition, and validation from Angel Investors on what they think of your ideas.

ANGELHACK 2.0

AngelHack 2 focuses on the startup communities in Boston and San Francisco and has over $75k in prizes to win. We estimate there to be over 600 participants for the March 3-4th event.

If you’re interested, your registration fee will be waived. There will be a small fee (between $20-$30) for the bus rental. Friday night accommodations will also be your responsibility, but Context.IO will work to get a great group deal at a hotel nearby. Keep in mind that Saturday night would be all hacking, so accommodations will only be required on Friday night. We’ll ride in Friday evening and take the bus back overnight on Sunday. Red eye FTW.

We need 30 hackers to be accepted to sponsor, so we’d love you all to come in big numbers.

This is an incredible opportunity for the Montreal Startup Scene. Being selected as a finalist or winner at this event would mean considerable press and visibility to some of the most high profile VCs in North America. Imagine Montreal took everyone by surprise with a win here? Let’s show them what we’re capable of!

Brainstorm on the bus, build in Boston, be totally awesome. This is not a weekend you should miss.

If you’re willing to commit, please submit your email address via the following form:

https://docs.google.com/a/dokdok.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEhYU3JSWUM3clhYNFJ4Zkhldmk4RHc6MQ

As soon as we have 30 hackers, we’ll confirm our participation and follow up with all the juicy details! As of now, we need 5 more to secure this opportunity!

We’ll try to sneak in a quick pub crawl around Boston on Friday night too