Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

question2answer Wordpress Integration

 Today I want to journal my implementation of a WordPress site with the package of "question2answer".  It comes as self-promoted as being able to integrate with WordPress "out of the box".  I'm going to vent a small amount of frustration here, because the only integration going on is the simplicity of configuration with using the same database, along with the user authentication of WordPress.  Otherwise they run as two separate sites/themes. This will not do. So let's get to some context.  I have a new hobby project in mind which requires a open source stack-overflow clone.  Enter question2answer .  Now I don't want to come across as completely ungrateful, this package - while old, ticks all the boxes and looks like it was well maintained, but I need every  page to look the same to have a seamless integration.  So, let's go through this step by step. Forum Index Update This step probably  doesn't need to be done, but I just wanted to mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Running NodeJS Serverless Locally

 So it's been a long time, but I thought this was a neat little trick so I thought I'd share it with the world - as little followers as I have.  In my spare time I've been writing up a new hobby project in Serverless , and while I do maintain a staging and production environment in AWS, it means I need to do a deployment every time I want to test all of the API's I've drafted for it. Not wanting to disturb the yaml configuration for running it locally, I've come up with a simple outline of a server which continues to use the same configuration.  Take the express driven server I first define here: And then put a index.js  in your routes folder to contain this code: Voila! This will take the request from your localhost and interpret the path against your serverless.yml and run the configured function.  Hope this helps someone!
Post a Comment
Read more

Machine Learning: Teaching Wisdom of the Crowd

I got lost in an absolute myriad of thoughts the other day, and it essentially wound up wondering if we can teach machines to count, beyond of what it can see in an image, and I've come up with a small experiment that I would absolutely love to collaborate on if anyone (@ Google ?) else is interested. The idea is based on  the concept of the experiments performed using " Wisdom of the Crowd ", commonly in this experiment to use a jar of jelly beans and asking many people to make a guess as to how many is in there.  Machine learning can be used to make predictions from patterns, but it would have nothing to gain looking at one picture of a jelly bean jar to the next and being able to correctly identify that is in fact - a jar of jelly beans. But suppose we feed it several images of jars of jelly beans, along with all of the guesses people have made of how many is in there.  Can we then presume that feeding it a new image, it would be able to give us a fairly accurate c...
Post a Comment
Read more