Introducing Project Hosting comments by email

Google Project Hosting is all about helping software developers work together on source code, code reviews, issues, and wiki pages for technical documentation. In fact, the projects we host have collectively accumulated several million issue comments. Working together means that, from time to time, the ball is in your court and you need to respond to other users.

We send out notification emails to let the appropriate users know when an issue has been entered or a comment has been added to an issue, wiki page, or code review. These emails contain a link that allows you to enter your response in your project on code.google.com/p. But starting now, we are making it much easier and faster to respond to these comments by processing email replies that you send us.

So, check your inbox for new notification emails sent directly to you. When you see an email footer line that says that you can reply, just press the reply button in your email client, bang out a thoughtful response, and hit “Send”. Project committers and owners can even update an issue’s status and other values via email. For example, to let your teammates know that you are working on an urgent defect report that just came in, reply with:

Subject: Re: Issue 123 in your-project: data loss when src == dst

Status: Started Owner: your-email-address Label: Priority-High Thanks for that detailed defect report. I never realized that we need to handle that case specially. I’m going to add a check for it right now.

Please try it out the next time you receive a notification email. If you have questions, see our documentation on inbound email and user groups.

By Jason Robbins, Google Project Hosting Team

Each and every email

By Ryan Propper, Google Apps Team

With hundreds (if not thousands) of popular email clients and mail servers out there, importing email into another service can be challenge, especially when you consider the troves of old email most people save. To ease this pain, we created the Google Apps Email Migration API.

This new API is available in Google Apps Premier, Partner, and Education Editions, and you can use it to migrate your existing email from anywhere into Google Apps. Let's say, for example, you want to import email from your Obscurix Email Server v2.0001715. Just write some parsing code and use our simple API to upload that email into the desired mailbox. For convenience, you can authenticate to the API not only as the end user of the destination mailbox, but also as a Google Apps administrator, and target any mailbox in the domain. This API uses the Google data API protocol, which means there are a host of client libraries to make importing even easier.

LimitNone (one of our Enterprise Professional partners) has already built a migration utility that works with calendars, email and contacts.

For more info, check out the Google Enterprise Blog, or just dive right into the developer's guide. And please, let us know what you think!