Google recently announced new policies regarding the use of their APIs and third party integrators (such as pdfconvert.me).  You can review the announcement here.

One of the requirements to continue the use of the restricted scopes (of which the service uses 3: gmail.readonly, gmail.modify (to modify the Pre/Post Labels only) and gmail.send), a third party security assessment is required, which can cost $15,000 USD or more.

While I understand why Gmail is requiring the new policies and assessments, and while I regularly undergo these sorts of security assessments as part of my regular day job, for the limited number of users on a free service, this is not something I am willing to pay for in either time or money.

As such, consider this an end of life announcement for the Gmail API integrations with pdfconvert.me. You can still use the service with Gmail by setting up automatic forwarding rules to the @pdfconvert.me addresses, but the API integrations will cease to function in the future when Google terminates my application’s approval.

I am disabling new signups to the service as of today (November 11th, 2018) but will continue to operate on existing accounts as long as Google (or you) allow.  As a reminder, you can always revoke access to pdfconvert.me via your Google account or I am happy to delete your account on my end (please email support@pdfconvert.me).

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for your support.

There were a few big features released this week for pdfconvert.me:

• Gmail API Integration - allows for automatic conversion of emails with a particular Gmail label
• Dropbox API Integration - allows for uploading resulting PDFs to a Dropbox ‘Apps/pdfconvert.me’ folder
• Support for sending conversion results to a specific address, using VERP-style encoding in the To: field. The first conversion to a return address will fail with an activation link which will authorize the service to send future emails without approval.
• Option token support - for several years I have supported special addresses that alter the behavior of the service, but they were manually setup to work with a particular address combination. Now these options are tokenized and will work across all addresses (where it makes sense). The main “verb” still needs to be in the address such as pdfconvert, webconvert, attachconvert, etc - but it can be anywhere in the address, as can the option(s). A list of current options is as follows:
  • noheaders - Supressess any originating email headers from the conversion result
  • dropbox - Uploads the conversion result to Dropbox (if you have linked your account with us)
  • dropbox-only - Only uploads the conversion result to Dropbox (no email will be returned with the attachment)
  • striptags - Removes Evernote-style tags from the subject/filename (# and @)
  • noreplyto - Ignores the Reply-To: header in emails, so as not to send responses back to that address
  • nojs - Do not evaluate javascript on webconvert requests
  • content - For webconvert requests, only return the main text of the body

If you have other suggestions or feedback - please contact us!

Since the very beginning of pdfconvert.me, I haven’t been super pleased with the website design. I’m primarily a systems administrator and programmer, not a web developer. I finally was able to get some time to redo the website using Octopress, and I hope you find the new design more pleasing than the old. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please contact me.