Connectors (Integrations)

In Nylas, a connector (formerly called an "integration") stores information that allows your Nylas application to connect to a third party services, such as a provider auth application from Google (GCP), Microsoft (Azure), or to an IMAP provider. You must create a connector in your Nylas application for each specific provider before you can create Grants and access user data from that provider.

A Nylas connector stores data about how your Nylas application contacts the provider, the default permissions the Nylas application requests, and is generally the starting point for any authentication with that provider.

Connector contents

The connector stores a label provided by the user, the provider name or type (for example, google/microsoft/imap/virtual_calendar), an expiry time for the hosted authentication link, and the provider settings.

The "provider's settings" come from the provider itself when you create your provider auth application on Google, Azure, or IMAP. For example, a provider's settings might contain the provider auth application's client_id and client_secret. Nylas stores these values securely and uses them as default credentials when authenticating with that provider.

Nylas follows modern security best practices to encode and encrypt these provider settings, to ensure that they can never be obtained by a third party, including Nylas internal employees.

What are limitations of connectors?

Connectors are associated with a single Nylas application.

You can have only one Nylas connector for each type of provider. For example, your Nylas application can have only one Google connector.

If you want to create a grant for a different provider auth application, (for example, on a different GCP project, but you already have a default Google connector), you can create additional credentials for your connector. Each connector can have multiple credentials, where each credential represents a different provider auth application. For more information, see Using multiple provider applications.