I need to find a way to search through Gmail messages using code, ideally with C#. What I want to do is retrieve all emails that match specific criteria like category:Important sender:[email protected] so I can process the message content automatically.
I tried looking for solutions but most of the older libraries I found seem outdated or don’t support the search functionality I need. Has anyone successfully implemented Gmail searching in their applications? What’s the current best approach for this kind of automation?
imap’s way easier if you don’t need gmail api’s advanced features. just flip on imap in settings and grab the mailkit library - saves you from oauth headaches. search isn’t as robust as gmail’s syntax, but basic filtering handles most stuff just fine.
Use the Google.Apis.Gmail.v1 NuGet package for C#. I built something similar last year for monitoring support tickets. Once you get OAuth working, searching works just like the web interface. What tripped me up was message parsing - Gmail splits messages into parts, so you’ll need to dig through the payload structure to pull out plain text or HTML. The actual searching is easy after authentication. Don’t forget error handling for network issues and API exceptions. Token refresh gets messy if your app runs unattended - store refresh tokens securely and handle expiration properly.
Gmail API v1 with C# is your best option. I’ve used it for similar automation for two years - it handles search queries really well. You’ll need OAuth2 auth first, which is annoying to set up but runs smooth after that. Your search syntax works directly with the API. Just pass category:Important sender:[email protected] to Users.Messages.List() using the q parameter. Watch out for rate limits though - learned this the hard way when processing big batches. Google’s quotas will bite you if you’re not careful. Also handle pagination properly since results come in chunks. The docs got way better recently, so setup shouldn’t be too painful.