Gmail Becomes a Flawed App Platform - Google Adds OAuth to IMAP - Need Access Control By Filters
I wrote about Email as a platform one year ago. Now Gmail has finally allowed OAuth on IMAP which means you don't need to reveal your password to any app that accesses your emails through IMAP on your behalf.
Why would you want an app to access and act your emails? Because your email box is so overflowed. Here are a couple of uses:
- get alerts on important emails
- have an app scan through your order confirmation emails and keep a history of your purchases(this is how Blippy got your Amazon purchase history. I know Blippy sounds crazy. I don't think it'll ever succeed in consumer space. But for business users, there's a business case for auto-parsing out email order receipts and filling out expense reports.)
- a smarter auto-responder
- a smarter auto-labelr
However the GMail OAuth addition to IMAP is not good enough because it allows un-restricted access. Emails are personal and can contain a lot of sensitive information(such as password recovery emails). A much better model is to grant granular access by filters. GMail has a pretty good filter system. So I should be able to tell Gmail that what apps can access what emails by filters.
In the example of Blippy getting Amazon purchase history, I can just create a GMail filter by subject and from-email to filter out all the Amazon order-related emails and let Blippy access them. It's really none of Blippy's business to access my other emails.
