Context.IO Email API version 1.1

Welcome to the Context.IO Email API documentation site. This API has been in use in production for a few months and is already tracking more than 40 million emails in mailboxes kept in sync via IMAP.

This documentation is still a work in progress as we are preparing to open this API to other developers.

About our API

Extracting useful data form your user's mailbox

The intention behind developing this API is to make it easy for application developers to leverage the data contained in their users mailboxes within their application.

It's not meant as a way for your application to send or receive emails, it's a tool to extract rich information from the mailbox your users use as their own email address.

Does it do anything beyond accessible email information?

Sure! You can get web-based previews of attachments, get the version history of attached files and even get a list of insertions and deletions between 2 versions of an attachment.

Privacy and confidentiality

Email contains confidential and private data. When you access your user's mailbox through our API they trust both you and us to treat that data with the highest level of confidentiality.

Our servers do not store anything more than metadata from mailboxes: to, from, cc, dates, subject, name of files attached. The message bodies and attachment content are not stored.

Getting an API key

Click the big orange button on Context.IO and enter your email address. We'll get in touch with you quickly.

Technical points

What kind of mailboxes can be accessed?

Anything that can be accessed via IMAP, you can access via our API.

Do you need to know the usernames and passwords of mailboxes?

Not if the mailbox supports OAuth over IMAP. At this time, the only email servers that support OAuth over IMAP is Google (both on Gmail and Google Apps accounts). In other cases, yes. Our API is basically an email client, we need to be able to open an authenticated connection to extract the information.

Can I move or delete emails through your API?

No. Our API is currently read only. You can't move or delete emails and it won't affect the read/unread flags on messages.

Can I send emails?

No. If you don't want to use your own SMTP server, there are great services for email delivery like CakeMail and Sendgrid.