Build Email Inbox Management and Search Features With Nylas

If you’re integrating email functionality into your app, there’s a good chance you’ll need to perform common inbox management functions like marking emails as unread and organizing messages into folders and labels. There’s also a good chance that you want to implement email inbox search functionality to help your users quickly find relevant emails.

These features are table stakes for any application that leverages email data and functionality, and the Nylas Email API is the easiest way to accomplish this task. The Nylas Communications Platform provides a single point of integration that instantly connects 100% of email, calendar and contacts providers to your app, via simple REST APIs.  This article will show you how to use Nylas to manage a user’s inbox and search for email messages.

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• Next.js, a framework for making server-rendered React apps
• Express.js to create RESTful endpoints on the server
• JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication
• Lowdb, a lightweight key-value database powered by Lodash, for storing user information

There are two primary ways that an email inbox can be organized: labels or folders. Gmail is the only provider that uses labels, and every other provider, including Exchange, Office 365, and IMAP providers all user folders. This article will focus specifically on working with labels for Gmail accounts, but all of this functionality can be adapted for providers that use folders if necessary. The only functional difference between labels and folders is that an email message can have multiple labels applied to it, while alternatively it can only be contained in a single folder.

Since labels are only available for Gmail accounts, the first thing you need to do is identify the provider for the user account. The Nylas Account endpoint provides two fields to help accomplish this

• provider indicates which of the supported provider types the account is.
• organization_unit indicates if the account uses labels for folders for organization.

Here’s how to check for each of these attributes with the Nylas Node SDK:

const account = await nylas.account.get();
if (account.provider === "gmail") {
        // This account uses labels!
}
if (account.organizationUnit === "label") {
        // This account uses labels!
}

const displayName = req.body.displayName;
const label = nylas.labels.build();
label.displayName = displayName;
await label.save();

res.json({
        id: label.id,
        displayName: label.displayName
});

const accountLabels = await nylas.labels.list();

const DEFAULT_LABELS = [
        "inbox",
        "all",
        "trash",
        "archive",
        "drafts",
        "sent",
        "spam",
        "important"
];

const labels = accountLabels
        .filter(label => !DEFAULT_LABELS.includes(label.name))
        .map(label => ({
                id: label.id,
                displayName: label.displayName,
                checked: !!thread.labels.find(({ id }) => id === label.id)
        }));

const id = req.params.id;
const thread = await nylas.threads.find(id, null, { view: "expanded" });

const threadDefaultLabels = thread.labels.filter(label =>
        DEFAULT_LABELS.includes(label.name)
);

thread.labels = [
        ...threadDefaultLabels,
        ...req.body.labels.filter(label => label.checked)
];

await thread.save();

const PAGE_LIMIT = 6; // Limit the number of results to make the request faster
const page = req.query.page >= 1 ? req.query.page : 1;
const search = req.query.search;

const threads = await nylas.threads.search(search, {
        limit: PAGE_LIMIT + 1,
        offset: (page - 1) * PAGE_LIMIT
});

const Promise = require("bluebird");
const results = Promise.map(threads, async thread => {
        const messages = await nylas.messages.list({
                thread_id: thread.id
        });
        thread.messages = messages;
        return thread;
}, { concurrency: 5 });

res.status(200).json({
        hasPrevious: page > 1,
        hasNext: threads.length > PAGE_LIMIT,
        threads: threads.slice(0, PAGE_LIMIT).map(thread => ({
                id: thread.id,
                subject: thread.subject,
                from: thread.from,
                date: thread.lastMessageTimestamp,
                snippet: thread.snippet,
                unread: thread.unread,
                hasAttachments: thread.hasAttachments
        }))
});