Retrieve unread message count using SSO authentication

[Jason Lehmer]

I have a portal solution that supports a broad user community. Each user has a corresponding Google Apps account through our organization. On the front page of our portal the user sees a "Check Email" link, which if they click through, will take them to their Google Mail account. The user is not prompted for any authentication due to the SSO solution we have in place. The problem is our users rarely click through to check their email because their is no indication that they have unread mail. The obvious solution is to add the unread mail count on the "Check Email" link to prompt the user to click through.

 

To solve for this I've looked at the the following options:

• Gmail IMAP/SMTP using OAuth
• This solution does not allow for SSO integration and would force us to grant the OAuth permissions to our portal app for each and every user account setup in Google.
• My understanding is that using IMAP and SMTP would also force us to download all the messages from the user's inbox and count the unreads. My concern is the that this would be too much of a performance hit on front page loading time.
• Gmail's (ATOM) Inbox Feed
• This option seems promising since there is an unread count (<fullcount>) in the feed.
• The problem is the feed only supports HTTP Basic authentication, yet again not possible with our SSO integration.

My question is has anyone implemented similar functionality using SSO? Is there another potential solution out there I'm missing? Have I misunderstood the capabilities of the two solutions I researched?

 

Any input you can provide is much appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Jason

[Jay Lee]

Use 2-legged OAuth to access IMAP then you don't need to know user logins or require their authorization. You don't need to get all messages to get the unread count, it's as simple as:

import imaplib, re
conn = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com", 993)
conn.login(username, password)               # This line would be replaced with the OAuth Authentication
unreadCount = re.search("UNSEEN (\d+)", conn.status("INBOX", "(UNSEEN)")[1][0]).group(1)

that code was blatantly stolen from:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953561/check-unread-count-of-gmail-messages-with-python

Jay