As we announced last week, Inbox is a whole new take on, well, the inbox. It’s built by the Gmail team, but it’s not Gmail—it’s a new product designed to help users succeed in today’s world of email overload and multiple devices. At the same time, Inbox can also help you as a sender by offering new tools to make your emails more interactive!

Specifically, you can now take advantage of a new feature called Highlights.

Exactly like it sounds, Highlights “highlight” or surface key information and actions from an email and display them as easy-to-see chips in the inbox. For example, if you’re an airline that sends flight confirmation emails, Highlights can surface the “Check-in for your flight” action and display live flight status information for recipients right in the user’s main list. The same can apply if you send customers hotel reservations, event details, event invitations, restaurant reservations, purchases, or other tickets. Highlights help ensure that your recipients see your messages and the important details at a glance.

To take advantage of Highlights, you can mark up your email messages to specify which details you want surfaced for your customers. This will make it possible for not only Inbox, but also Gmail, Google Now, Google Search, and Maps to interact more easily with your messages and give your recipients the best possible experience across Android, iOS and the web.

As an example, the following JSON-LD markup can be used by restaurants to send reservation confirmations to their users/customers:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "FoodEstablishmentReservation",
  "reservationNumber": "WTA1EK",
  "reservationStatus": "http://schema.org/Confirmed",
  . . . information about dining customer . . .
  "reservationFor": {
    "@type": "FoodEstablishment",
    "name": "Charlie’s Cafe",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway",
      "addressLocality": "Mountain View",
      "addressRegion": "CA",
      "postalCode": "94043",
      "addressCountry": "United States"
    },
    "telephone": "+1 650 253 0000"
  },
  "startTime": "2015-01-01T19:30:00-07:00",
  "partySize": "2"
}
</script>

When your confirmation is received, users will see a convenient Highlight with the pertinents at the top of their Inbox, then can open the message to obtain the full details of their reservation as shown above.

Getting started is simple: read about email markup, check out more markup examples, then register at developers.google.com/gmail/markup and follow the instructions from there!


by Shalini Agarwal, Product Management, Inbox by Gmail

Cross-posted from the Google Apps Updates blog.

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information — from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access Add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.



Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:

• formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
• Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
• Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 

We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more helpful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks. 

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager, Google Apps Script

We’d like to highlight some recent and upcoming changes around authentication for Gmail IMAP, POP, and SMTP.

Additional Scrutiny for Password Authentication 
As previously announced, Google has begun increasing the security checks that occur when logging in with a user’s Google password. This includes access via Gmail IMAP, POP, and SMTP-MSA. It does not apply when authenticating with OAuth 2.0 via the XOAUTH2 mechanism.

If the checks detect anything suspicious about a password login attempt, our servers may deny login and return an error message requesting that the user first login to Google through a web browser. They may also require the user to explicitly enable “Less Secure Apps” on their account. Applications that perform password authentication to IMAP, POP, or SMTP are examples of "Less Secure Apps".

We strongly encourage developers to use OAuth 2.0 (via the XOAUTH2 mechanism for IMAP, POP, and SMTP) in order to better protect their users.

XOAUTH support ends May 5, 2015 
The OAuth 1.0 XOAUTH authentication mechanism for Gmail IMAP and SMTP-MSA is deprecated and will stop being supported on May 5, 2015. Developers must migrate to XOAUTH2 in order to continue authenticating to Gmail after that date. You can migrate existing users without their intervention by following the instructions in this migration guide. Instructions for developing your XOAUTH2 code are in the XOAUTH2 documentation.

Posted by Jamie Nicolson, Gmail Software Engineer

Update (Oct 17, 2014): Add-ons can now also use time-driven triggers.

Earlier this year, we introduced add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets—packaged Apps Script projects that users can easily install from our add-on store to get extra functionality and features.
Since then, plenty of developers told us they were eager to add installable Apps Script triggers to their add-ons. We're happy to announce that now you can do just that, making it possible to respond to more user actions. For example, a spreadsheet add-on can now react when a user submits a response to a Google Form, or can call a method that requires authorization when a user edits a cell.
Add-ons can now programmatically create and manage these installable triggers:

• Sheets add-ons can use the change, edit, open, and form-submit installable triggers.
• Docs add-ons can use the (new!) open installable trigger.

To see the power of installable triggers in action, check out developer Romain Vialard's Yet Another Mail Merge, which has already been updated. The original YAMM lets users quickly personalize Gmail drafts by replacing placeholder fields with data from a spreadsheet. The new version uses a trigger to send an email whenever a form is submitted.
If you've worked with installable triggers before, you'll find that they behave a little differently in add-ons (for one thing, there are no pesky "Summary of failures" emails!), so be sure to check out the documentation.
Posted by Edward Jones, Googler