This story, courtesy of Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, explains how deploying OAuth in conjunction with the mail handling protocol underlying GMail makes some very interesting mail mashups possible. Marshall noted that a company called Sypher is the first to market with a Web service that allows GMail users to define rules for filtering email and pushing conforming messages to one’s iPhone. [Sypher’s Web site was down when I attempted to learn more but the LifeHacker blog has this description of its “awesome” features].

A blog post by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager at Google, characterizes the addition of OAuth as “consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.” In this case, OAuth provides the means for 3rd party application developers to build solutions that require access to messages or other information that reside in GMail’s password protected region.

As a reminder, OAuth is an open protocol designed to allow people to share such things as photos, files and now GMail messages with other folks without having to give out their usernames and passwords. OAuth provides a means for its users to hand out software “tokens” instead. Each token contains code that grants access to a specific site and for specific resources within that site for a defined period of time. It is a crucial enabling technology for Recombinant Communications solutions in cases where some crucial elements reside inside a password protected site. Twtter’s API has supported OAuth-based access for a while now and expectation has been building both from developers and users to make it easier for people to protect privacy and control while while mixing or surfing through a multiplicity of their favorite password protected sites without regard to whether they are at their desktops or on their mobile devices.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Twitter, Recombinant Communications, GMail, OAuth