Gmail rolls out official Gmail API push notifications

Good news for developers whose apps have to keep in step with changes in a Gmail mailbox: Google is rolling out support for push notifications for the Gmail application programming interface (API).

Eric DeFriez of the Gmail Extensibility Team said this takes a load off developers who have to poll the Gmail API's history feed for updates.

"Just subscribe to a Gmail mailbox and whenever a change occurs, the Gmail API will instantly notify your server using webhooks or another Cloud Pub/Sub API notification method. No polling required," he said.

He said the feature was announced at Google's recent I/O 2015.

A separate report on The Next Web said Google launched at its I/O developer conference last year the official Gmail API.

It said the support for push notification is a "small but important" additional feature.

"The inclusion of push notification support means third party developers no longer have to poll Gmail for new messages, which helps eliminate time and extra network costs," it said.

It added that while developers can still use IMAP, the official Gmail API "will support all the features that come with Gmail, such as drafts, replies and native search, to name a few." — Joel Locsin/LBG, GMA News