Originally posted on G Suite Developer blog
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy ), Developer Advocate, G Suite
The Gmail API team introduced a new settings feature earlier this year , and today, we're going to
explore some of that goodness, showing developers how to update Gmail user
settings with the API.
Email continues to be a dominant form of communication, personally and
professionally, and our email signature serves as both a lightweight
introduction and a business card. It's also a way to slip-in a sprinkling of your
personality. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could automatically change your
signature whenever you wanted without using the Gmail settings interface every
time? That is exactly what our latest video is all about.
VIDEO
If your app has already created a Gmail API service endpoint, say in a variable
named GMAIL , and you have the
YOUR_EMAIL email address whose signature should be changed
as well as the text of the new signature, updating it via the API is as pretty
straightforward, as illustrated by this Python call to the
GMAIL .users().settings().sendAs().patch() method:
signature = {'signature': '"I heart cats." ~anonymous'}
GMAIL.users().settings().sendAs().patch(userId='me',
sendAsEmail=YOUR_EMAIL, body=signature).execute()
For more details about the code sample used in the requests above as well as in
the video, check out the deepdive post . In
addition to email signatures, other settings the API can modify include:
filters, forwarding (addresses and auto-forwarding), IMAP and POP settings to
control external email access, and the vacation responder. Be aware that while
API access to most settings are available for any G Suite Gmail account, a few
sensitive operations, such as modifying send-as aliases or forwarding, are
restricted to users with domain-wide authority.
Developers interested in using the Gmail API to access email threads and
messages instead of settings can check out this other
video where we show developers how to search for threads with a minimum
number of messages, say to look for the most discussed topics from a mailing
list. Regardless of your use-case, you can find out more about the
Gmail API in the developer
documentation . If you're new to the API, we suggest you start with the overview page which
can point you in the right direction!
Be sure to subscribe to the Google
Developers channel and check out other episodes in the G Suite Dev Show video series .