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An email API, or application programming interface is a tool that enables developers to easily access data and functions offered by email service providers (ESPs) — such as Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and others. By building integrations with email APIs, developers can quickly build applications allowing end-users to generate and send messages, manipulate templates, move or edit folders, build drafts, and perform additional email functions without switching between multiple platforms.
Email API providers take care of protocol matters such as message assembly, message sending, and reporting that would otherwise need to be specified by a business’s application software development team. On top of that, email APIs enable powerful data analytics — which you otherwise wouldn’t get by integrating with the ESP directly.
Email is the most popular communication channel globally, with users sending more than 306 billion emails daily. And many of these communications occur between businesses and their customers, prospects, partners, and employees.
For your users, drafting emails from scratch can take valuable hours and resources, especially when sending similar messages repeatedly. It’s easy to fall into a pattern and become complacent, leading to errors and inconsistencies in content.
For your developers, building custom integrations with each email service provider wastes resources that could be better spent advancing your roadmap. Writing software to automate emails from scratch is possible but requires constant maintenance and often results in a substandard user experience. Doing so at scale to thousands of people is nearly impossible without the help of a dedicated development team.
Email APIs provide businesses an efficient, customizable, and secure way to send and receive emails within their platforms and applications.
Email APIs allow developers to integrate email functionalities with minimal coding. For example, if you wanted get the last 5 messages from a user’s inbox, you would use this code:
Node.js
Ruby
Python
Java
Curl
Response
app.get("/nylas/recent-emails", async (req, res) => {
try {
const identifier = process.env.USER_GRANT_ID;
const messages = await nylas.messages.list({
identifier,
queryParams: {
limit: 5,
},
});
res.json(messages);
} catch (error) {
console.error("Error fetching emails:", error);
}
});
require 'nylas'
nylas = Nylas::Client.new(api_key: 'API_KEY')
query_params = { limit: 5 }
messages, _ = nylas.messages.list(identifier: '<GRANT_ID>', query_params: query_params)
messages.each {|message|
puts "[#{Time.at(message[:date]).strftime("%d/%m/%Y at %H:%M:%S")}] \
#{message[:subject]}"
}
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()
import os
import sys
from nylas import Client
nylas = Client(
os.environ.get('NYLAS_API_KEY'),
os.environ.get('NYLAS_API_URI')
)
grant_id = os.environ.get("NYLAS_GRANT_ID")
messages = nylas.messages.list(
grant_id,
query_params={
"limit": 5
}
)
print(messages)
import com.nylas.NylasClient;
import com.nylas.models.*;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
public class ReadInbox {
public static void main(String[] args) throws NylasSdkTimeoutError, NylasApiError {
NylasClient nylas = new NylasClient.Builder("<NYLAS_API_KEY>").build();
ListMessagesQueryParams queryParams = new ListMessagesQueryParams.Builder().limit(5).build();
ListResponse<Message> message = nylas.messages().list("<GRANT_ID>", queryParams);
for(Message email : message.getData()) {
String date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss").
format(new java.util.Date((email.getDate() * 1000L)));
System.out.println("[" + date + "] | " + email.getSubject());
}
}
}
curl --request GET \
--url "https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/grants/NYLAS_GRANT_ID/messages?limit=5" \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY_OR_ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json'
{
"request_id": "d0c951b9-61db-4daa-ab19-cd44afeeabac",
"data": [
{
"starred": false,
"unread": true,
"folders": [
"UNREAD",
"CATEGORY_PERSONAL",
"INBOX"
],
"grant_id": "1",
"date": 1706811644,
"attachments": [
{
"id": "1",
"grant_id": "1",
"filename": "invite.ics",
"size": 2504,
"content_type": "text/calendar; charset=\"UTF-8\"; method=REQUEST"
},
{
"id": "2",
"grant_id": "1",
"filename": "invite.ics",
"size": 2504,
"content_type": "application/ics; name=\"invite.ics\"",
"is_inline": false,
"content_disposition": "attachment; filename=\"invite.ics\""
}
],
"from": [
{
"name": "Nylas DevRel",
"email": "[email protected]"
}
],
"id": "1",
"object": "message",
"snippet": "Send Email with Nylas APIs",
"subject": "Learn how to Send Email with Nylas APIs",
"thread_id": "1",
"to": [
{
"name": "Nyla",
"email": "[email protected]"
}
],
"created_at": 1706811644,
"body": "Learn how to send emails using the Nylas APIs!"
}
],
"next_cursor": "123"
}
Before email APIs became widely available, businesses would typically use one of the following methods to send and receive emails:
Overall, these older methods of sending and receiving emails are less scalable and sustainable than email APIs. Email APIs provide a more efficient and reliable way to send and receive emails, with built-in security, spam filtering, and analytics.
Focus on your business strategy, NOT on infrastructure. Investing in pre-built productivity tools frees up resources so your team can focus on building unique features your customers love.
Email APIs fall broadly into two categories: transactional and contextual email APIs. Transactional and contextual email APIs serve different purposes, so it’s not necessarily a matter of one being better. Many business use cases require multiple email APIs to deliver a convenient, unified customer experience (see here for more information on how product teams use combined transactional, contextual, and marketing email APIs).
Transactional email APIs send bulk or routine emails like notifications, password reset emails, and mass marketing campaigns through third-party email providers. These APIs can be specifically tailored to avoid mass marketing campaign flags. Mailgun, MailChimp, and SendGrid are examples of well-developed transactional email API providers. Transactional APIs are crucial because they allow businesses to automate essential communication with customers, improve email deliverability, and provide valuable insight into email engagement.
Contextual email APIs embed robust email connectivity directly into software applications. Productivity tools, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, applicant tracking systems, and car consoles use email APIs. Contextual emails allow you to send, receive, and collect analytics and handle general create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functions for each ESP. The Nylas Email API is an example of a contextual email API, acting as a layer of
abstraction on top of all email providers.
Learn more about Transactional email APIs vs Contextual email APIs here.
Email APIs are not all created equal. Some email APIs offer more advanced features, better performance, and greater reliability. Businesses and developers should carefully consider the features they need from an email API when selecting a solution and choose one that best fits their needs and requirements.
Here’s a list of features that should factor into your decision-making when tackling email integration:
These API features can help businesses improve email communications, automate various tasks, and gain valuable insights into email performance.
Businesses and developers may use an email API to add email capabilities to their website or application, as building this functionality from scratch can be challenging. This process is time-consuming for a large development team, but this effort is multiplied for small teams or solo developers.
Email APIs offer a range of benefits for teams of any size, such as:
One of the top three reasons our customers churn was email deliverability. Nylas solved a top three problem for us overnight. We went from close to 0% to nearly 100% deliverability.
CEO at Now.Site
When tasked with adding email capabilities to your platform or application, you and your developers must decide whether to build the integration in-house or adopt an Email API solution. Both options have different benefits and drawbacks, and the choice will depend on your business’s resources, needs, and goals.
Building an email integration that spans all providers can take more than a year, quickly accrue costs, expend developer resources, and disrupt your product roadmap. Furthermore, the risk involved when teams attempt their own email integration is a significant technical and legal concern. To build email integrations, you must understand complex protocols (such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP) and have the expertise to navigate security measures. As email integrations involve sensitive user data, you also must know and comply with data privacy laws like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Consider these points to help you decide whether to develop or purchase your next integration or platform capability:
These caveats often prompt companies to integrate with an email API. Doing so enables developers to easily add full email functionality, ship products quickly, and go to market faster. For developers, an email API abstracts away the messy details of sending in-app communications using traditional protocols and allows them to dedicate their efforts to more meaningful product differentiators.
Businesses and their developers can use email APIs to send and manage messages programmatically.
Here are the steps to getting started:
Overall, businesses and their developers can use an email API to programmatically send personalized and targeted email messages, improve the reliability and scalability of their email service, and monitor and analyze the performance of their campaigns.
Email integration has always been a profoundly technical challenge for any developer who wants to build comprehensively and move fast. But with the advent of cloud server architecture and API-driven email service platforms, companies can add complex, highly performant email functionality into their applications with little or no knowledge of email administration or telecommunications protocols.
Partnering with an email API provider offers a streamlined workflow for quickly integrating functionality and grants features such as service reliability guarantees and analytics reports. Get started today and build for free with Nylas email API.
Email API is an application programming interface that enables developers to interact with email service providers like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail. It simplifies the process of building applications that allow end-users to send emails, manage templates, organize folders, create drafts, and execute other email-related tasks without having to switch between different platforms.
Creating an email API is a complex and challenging task that involves defining endpoints, methods, parameters, and security protocols to enable developers to interact with an email system. It requires a deep understanding of email technology and protocols and expertise in API development, programming languages, and frameworks.
There are several email APIs available that allow developers to integrate email functionality into their applications or platforms. One example is Nylas — the fastest and easiest way to connect to your users’ inboxes, powering engaging, embedded email capabilities with 99.6% deliverability and enterprise-grade security. In addition to email, the Nylas platform powers calendar and contacts integrations.
Other popular email APIs include SMPT.com, SendGrid, Mailgun, Twilio SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Postmark. Businesses and their developers should choose an email API that best suits their needs based on cost, features, and ease of integration.