How to get new message detailes via Gmail push notifications? - email

I have java server application. And I need to monitor a lot of gmail accounts to be able to send push notifications to mobile devices about new Inbox messages.
I need to know sender email and message subject to send push notification.
And I tried Gmail push notifications system (webhooks option)
If I understood everything correctly in order to get needed info for each new message for each user there is a following scenario:
Google sends me email and history id via https request.
I call history API and get new message ids for user
I request message info by message id
That means that I need 2 additional requests for each new message of each user. And it looks quite hard if server needs to handle several new messages each second. And I still don't see other way.
Is there any way to make it shorter? (e.g. to make google send me not only history id but needed new message details or at least make one additional request, but not two)
Thanks!

We tried using Push notifications but the volume of requests generated has meant that we poll on a timed basis instead. It is worth noting that you will get Push notifications for any change to the message such as a label change, a read status change etc. As you say there are many requests.
If you need the notifications real-time I don't see how you can avoid the process that you outline.
If you don't need it real-time then you can poll or at the least check for Push notifications per account on a timed basis and if some have been received retrieve any new messages in a batch rather than a single request.

I was facing the same problem. History API was not giving recent messageId. I solved this problem by hitting THREAD API where i set Q = last 5 min timestamp.
Webhook push notification is helping to notify a new mail has come. After i get all messages last 10 min with THREAD API.

Related

What to do if a RESTful api is only partly successful

In our design we have something of a paradox. We have a database of projects. Each project has a status. We have a REST api to change a project from “Ready” status to “Cleanup” status. Two things must happen.
update the status in the database
send out an email to the approvers
Currently RESTful api does 1, and if that is successful, do 2.
But sometimes the email fails to send. But since (1) is already committed, it is not possible to rollback.
I don't want to send the email prior to commit, because I want to make sure the commit is successful before sending the email.
I thought about undoing step 1, but that is very hard. The status change involves adding new records to the history table, so I need to delete them. And if another person make other changes concurrently, the undo might get messed up.
So what can I do? If (2) fails, should I return “200 OK” to the client?
Seems like the best option is to return “500 Server Error” with error message that says “The project status was changed. However, sending the email to the approvers failed. Please take appropriate action.”
Perhaps I should not try to do 1 + 2 in a single operation? But that just puts the burden on the client, which is worse!
Just some random thoughts:
You can have a notification sent status flag along with a datetime of submission. When an email is successful then it flips, if not then it stays. When changes are submitted then your code iterates through ALL unsent notifications and tries to send. No idea what backend db you are suing but I believe many have the functionality to send emails as well. You could have a scheduled Job (SQL Server Agent for MSSQL) that runs hourly and tries to send if the datetime of the submission is lapsed a certain amount or starts setting off alarms if it fails as well.
If ti is that insanely important then maybe you could integrate a third party service such as sendgrid to run as a backup sending mech. That of course would be more $$ though...
Traditionally I've always separated functions like this into a backend worker process that handles this kind of administrative tasking stuff across many different applications. Some notifications get sent out every morning. Some get sent out every 15 minutes. Some are weekly summaries. If I run into a crash and burn then I light up the event log and we are (lucky/unlucky) enough to have server monitoring tools that alert us on specified application events.

XMPP: count of unread messages

I'm trying to implement chat for my webapp with following features:
When user logs in he should see a number of unread messages (which is both offline messages and "unseen", I will explain "unseen" in next step).
When user is anywhere in the app but on chat window he should be notified that he has a new message. Message should be marked "unseen" and must be added to the count of unread messages.
The first point is quite easily achieved using XEP-0013: Flexible Offline Message Retrieval. So I can retrieve offline messages and when I'm sure user has seen them - I remove them from unread list. But the problem is: how do I achieve same thing for "unseen" messages?
In short what I need is: any message should be marked as offline, unless user sees it and it's removed from the list by explicit request.
Can I achieve that with XMPP and how do I do that?
Thanks in advance.
What you are trying to do is to basically store a counter of unseen stuff in your account. I think you do not need flexible offline retrieval as when you connect the messages would simply become unseen. You thus only have to deal with one case: Unseen.
I will reply from the perspective of ejabberd, that I know better as one of the developer: I would use private storage to store your current state of unseen count and conversation.

Facebook Graph API subscription to /pages/conversations does not update on outgoing messages

I'm working with Facebook pages and building an app that allows you to send/receive private messages for your page from an external app.
Everything works fine, I can import old messages, send new one. My issue comes from the real time update subscription.
As explained here and here, I have subscribed to the conversations field on the page object. I also set up my server to receive Facebook verification and the updates.
I do receive updates when someone sends a new message to my test page ( even if it's a bit slow ~30 sec delay ) but I never receive any updates when the page replies to a message.
Is there something else I need to subscribe to in order to receive these updates ? Do I need to look for another way to do it ? Or is it just not supported by Facebook real time API updates ?
Any help appreciated, let me know if you need more info and have a nice day.

Facebook real time inbox messages with Graph API v2

Does anyone know a way to fetch a user/page inbox messages in real time?
I've found this link, but there is no mention about inbox messages.
The Real-time updates are about... -updates-. That means you will only get notified about changes in the fields described in that link (not regarding the Payments API, that's a different case).
So, you can't get real-time inbox messages.
You can subscribe to the notifications, but I'm not really sure if Messages notifications are included in those...

Could one iOS application support multiple push notification registration?

This is the first time that I approach the push notification service and I'm little bit confused. I 'd like to have just some conceptual help, not code.
I need to build an app that should receive and register for different kind of notifications. For instance in my app I'd like that users could register for PROMO notifications category and NEWS notifications category, I'd like that they could choose which one they want to be notified.
Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
If nothing of that is offered by Apple Push services do you think that is possible to manage everything like that:
-I register the app device for notification if (PROMO || NEWS) are selected
-I get the token
-I send the token to my server giving also as additional info about the service which the user wants to subscribe
-The server (provider) register the token and the kind of subscription (PROMO || NEWS)
-Later when I have a notification to push I ask the server all the tokens registered for that specific category and then I send the notification only to those devices registered for that category.
Thanks for helping me out I'm really confused.
"Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?"
YES
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
YES, you need a DB where you connect a Push Token with the related Services (promo | news). If you have a new Promo Push Message you send the message to all related token. on the app site, everytime the user change the categorie (promo / news) you should prpvide these infos to your service with the push token.
These are all problems that you have to solve yourself on the server side. The push service simply provides a means to send a single message to a single device. You have to figure out yourself which messages you want to send to which devices. Each message has to be sent individually, there's no way to "broadcast" a message to all your users directly.
You could think of the push tokens as email addresses – of course, one email address might be subscribed to different newsletters from the same publisher, but it's the publisher's job (yours) to figure out whom to send which newsletters, not the email provider's (Apple's).
You should think of the push notification registration like my I send the user push notifications. Not what kind of push notification can I send the user.
Then you need to do serverside filtering on you categories, like the ones in your example promo and news.
The perferance of the user should be stored on your server, so you will know what kind of notification to send to which user.