Gmail push notifications in Rails

Question

I am developing an application where users add their Gmail accounts, and I do some classification work on their emails.

I want to be notified when a new email comes to any of the registered accounts.

A solution is to keep polling the accounts via IMAP and saving the last email date I have fetched to check whether there is a new mail or not, but this has a lot of overhead.

Any idea how to monitor Gmail and be notified when a new email is received and integrate this with a Rails app? Is there an extension which can do that and send a post request to my Rails application for example?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure IMAP is the only answer here.

You may want to see whether IDLE works--I've read conflicting answers. If it does, it's way more responsive than polling.

Otherwise, poll away.

Wikipedia article on IDLE