How to receive push notifications from my Gmail account?

Question

I\'d like to write an application which monitors a mailbox (ideally a Gmail mailbox). In brief, my question is how do I listen to incoming emails? I could always keep pulling em

Answer 1

The most universal "API" for monitoring a Gmail or Google Apps inbox is the IMAP protocol. There's some information about this here: Gmail IMAP OAuth for desktop clients

For Google Apps inboxes (not general consumer Gmail accounts), you can also use the Gmail Inbox Feed, which provides an AtomPub XML feed of unread messages in a Google Apps inbox: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/docs/inbox_feed.html