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I want to write an app that consolidates/aggregates multiple email accounts (e.g., att.net and gmail) so that the user can experience "one-stop-shopping" for all of their mail, or at least all of their personal email (I don't think it will be possible (or perhaps even illegal) to include work mail, such as Outlook, that may be behind corporate walls).

However, before I get started on this, I need to know if this is even possible for personal email, IOW: are the necessary "connection strings" for email providers such as gmail, hotmail, att.net/yahoo, etc. "public knowledge"?

Obviously, the user would need to enter their userName and passWord, but to connect to the appropriate mail server then - can I rely on it being something persistent and "open" for access?

Ben
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B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven
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  • This doesn't seem specific to Metro or windows 8... – Dominic Hopton Aug 05 '12 at 19:06
  • Sounds like you want to make an email client that handles multiple accounts. If so the standard way to do this is with imap and pop3 if they're supported. If they're not, you can't do it. – Piku Aug 05 '12 at 19:09
  • @Dominic: The question may not explicitly be Metro or Win8-specific, but the answer[s] might be. IOW, knowing that's what I'm talking about could alter the answer somebody may provide. – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven Aug 05 '12 at 21:19
  • The traditional solution (even pre-POP) would have been to forward a copy from all of these accounts to a central mailbox. Down the line, you would probably like to support something like IMAP+XOAuth but I guess so far pretty much only Gmail supports that. – tripleee Aug 06 '12 at 07:03

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All email providers provide standard Internet Protocols to access their email.

Most are POP3, many are IMAP. Gmail offers both of these, as do most providers.

POP3 Protocol Specification: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1939.html#b IMAP Protocol Specification: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html#b

ActiveSync (EAS) from Microsoft, and implemented by many major providers, and most (all?) phones is a proprietary protocol, which requires a license from Microsoft to implement: http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/intellectualproperty/iplicensing/programs/exchangeactivesyncprotocol.aspx

Most corporations allow ActiveSync access from external clients, however not many allow POP3, and some allow IMAP.

Dominic Hopton
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  • thanks. << 1down voteunaccept It should be noted that the Win8 in-box mail client supports unified inboxes showing the aggregation of all the accounts you have included.>> But does it allow related emails to be shown in a hierarchical fashion like "threads" in a newsreader? This is what I've always wanted, and what I'd like to implement. Whether it's possible/feasible or not is another question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11622951/is-there-a-way-to-tie-emails-together-other-than-by-the-subject-text) – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven Aug 05 '12 at 21:25
  • I know I could create "threaded conversations" (contextual) by looking at the subject and "re: Subject" or similar, but sometimes a respondent changes the subject, so I'm wondering if there's some internal metadata that indicates original subject title...otherwise, it would be a time-consuming guessing game to try to determine which emails are in context with another (time-consuming both in development terms and in awaiting the async results of such heuristics). – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven Aug 05 '12 at 22:57