The purpose of many emails is to get the recipient to do a specific task or
reach a goal, such as adding a calendar event, filling out a form, making a
reservation, or using other applications. However, recipients then have to
complete the task without any further prompting, often doing a number of
manual steps.
You can save time and effort for your users by automating these tasks with
Google Workspace Add-ons. When a user reads or composes a message in Gmail,
a Google Workspace Add-on can present an interactive, customized UI that lets
the user act on the message in various ways, such as by:
- Displaying additional information for the user in the Gmail UI.
- Connecting to non-Google services, to retrieve information or take other
actions.
- Providing the means to control the add-on behavior or send information to
another service.
Google Workspace Add-ons can define the following kinds of extensions within
Gmail:
In addition, Google Workspace Add-ons that extend Gmail do so on both desktop and mobile
clients.
Gmail homepages
Gmail supports displaying Google Workspace Add-on
homepages
.
To show your add-on's common homepage in Gmail simply make sure there
is a
addOns.gmail
field in the add-on's manifest.
Alternatively, add a
gmail.homepageTrigger
to the add-on manifest to provide a Gmail-specific homepage.
In either case, you must provide the name of a homepage trigger function in your
add-on's script project. This function is automatically called to build the
Gmail homepage when it is needed. You must implement this function to build
and return a single
Card
or an array of
Card
objects that make up the homepage. The homepage trigger function is passed an
event object
as a parameter that contains some general information such as the client's
platform. You can use the event object data to tailor the construction of the
homepage.
See what you can make
Google Workspace Add-ons are built using
Apps Script
, and their
interfaces defined using the Apps Script
Card service
. See
Building Google Workspace add-ons
for an overview. Google Workspace add-on behavior is configured using a
manifest
, which includes
Gmail-specific sections.
When configuring your Google Workspace Add-on to extend Gmail, you must
decide what interfaces to create for your add-on and what actions it can take.
See the following guides for more information: