Link to individual mails in gmail

Question

I want to download all emails in a gmail account and also want to get the unique url which will open the exact mail in gmail, off course with authentication. I tried using javax.mail imap library but Imap probably doesn't supports anything like it.

I can use "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" gmail feeds. but won't give me entire email and it only gives unread email and I don't want to miss any email

Answer 1

You can do this if you are using Google Apps for Business/Education. If you are, you can access the Gmail inbox feed (Atom) by using OAuth. OAuth can also be used to access Gmail via IMAP - you can then have complete access to the IMAP server programmatically, see Gmail IMAP and SMTP using OAuth.

Google has extended IMAP to allow developers to provide a more Gmail-like experience via IMAP, see: (Gmail IMAP Extensions, X-GM-EXT-1).

The unique message (X-GM-MSGID) and unique thread (X-GM-THRID) ids can be used to produce links to Gmail messages directly - you just have to hex encode the id long (e.g. Long.toHexString(x_gm_msgId)). Your link will then need need to be in the form of:

http://mail.google.com/mail?account_id=ACCOUNT_ID_HERE&message_id=MESSAGE_ID_HERE&view=conv&extsrc=atom

supplying ACCOUNT_ID_HERE (something like user@someplace.com) and MESSAGE_ID_HERE as appropriate.

I have been working in this area and think you might find my project useful, see: java-gmail-imap.

[NB: URLs formatted as above do not work on Gmail's mobile site (at least on iPhone/Safari).]

Answer 2

https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/HexEncodeMessageID replace the HexEncodeMessageID part with the ID. You get it, when you open the email in a new window (use the pop out icon in the upper right corner. The id looks like this: search=inbox&th=1426b8f59e003aa0

Answer 3

I'm fairly confident this is not possible - that there is no reliable way to get the unique URL that'll lead to a single email in Gmail. I'd love to hear otherwise!

I do believe it is possible to get a URL that will lead to the Gmail thread containing the message - but you have no control over which message(s) are "expanded" in this threaded display.