RESTful Email

February 21, 2014

There are a few different options for Email REST APIs, but none of them, as far as I can tell, are a replacement for the traditional email protocols, SMTP, POP, and IMAP. What would such a system look like?

First, instead of our usual email addresses, we’d have routes, so my email, , would look more like:

gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz

To GET all of my mail:

GET gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz

If I wanted mark message 123 as spam:

POST gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz/123/labels/spam

To get a message’s labels:

GET gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz/123/labels

To get all spam messages:

GET gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz/labels/spam

URL query strings on GETs could be used to filter results by the email metadata:

GET gmail.com/kyle.marek.spartz?from=gmail.com%2Fmichaeljburling

To send an email, we could POST to someone else’s inbox, with the message content in the request body:

POST gmail.com/michaeljburling

For security, we can incorporate public keys into the system. Before I can POST to gmail.com/michaeljburling, I would have to get Michael’s public key, and then use it and my private key to sign my message:

GET gmail.com/michaeljburling/public_key
POST gmail.com/michaeljburling

Any messages with an invalid signature would go directly to spam, so email spoofing would not be possible.