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The power of Google Script

I'm pretty excited to share today's post, because I have found inspiration on something I've wanted to do for quite a while.  I'm one of those users whose life is completely on Google.  A few years ago I had emptied my filing cabinet, scanned everything in and put them to easy to navigate folders in the Google Drive.  This is just amazing because I continue to photograph and scan everything including receipts - and if I need to return a product, I scan the barcode and the drive's image recognition can find it within either PDF's or images -- bang!

And then there is Google Photos, where I have tagged almost everyone I have ever known, and have migrated all of my albums to one easy to search location.  Finally after a few hours procrastinating, I even put a label next to each and every one of my contacts, and now never miss a beat.

But then there are my emails; while everything was up to date and marked as read, my labeling history here is less than to be desired.  And after about 20 years of my history on Google - that is just too much to catch up on.  It made sense that there should be some tool where I can select on a label from my contacts, and it would do a search from all the email addresses it links to - nope, doesn't exist.

I've now come across an old script by thirschbuechler that utilizes Google App Script to do just this.  It reminds me just how powerful this is, and by my personal experience only, quite an untapped resource.  This example demonstrates just configuring a single label from your contacts, extracting all email addresses and applying this label to the first 500 messages (ordered by received recent first) - you also need to create the label in Gmail first, but an excellent starting point for me.

So what I've now done is take this example and extend it so that it locates all of your contact labels, and all of the email addresses to the respective label.  It creates a parent label in Gmail and child labels of each of those in your contacts.  It then recursively locates email either sent to or from each group of emails, and applies the filter that the label doesn't already exist.  This is because that either my version or the predecessor will time out - because we all have thousands lying around our inbox - but when run on a scheduled task, it will eventually catch up on itself.

I've made this repository public, feel free and give me your suggestions. I'd also be thrilled to hear how Google Scripts to make your day/work easier, as well.

J.

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