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

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

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

Google Sheets Web App

 Greetings! Has been yet another long period since my last post, but hopefully the type of content makes up for it.  Today I'm writing about a need that I had to document my entire movie collection in Google Sheets, because some that were on my local network, some on DVD, some on my Playstation Video account and as well as my small collection in Google TV.  All in all there is currently over 500 movies, and growing. So the spreadsheet is fine on its own, but something nice and "pretty" was needed to list, search and filter by the movie's attributes.  I first got an API key to be used with  OMDB API .  This allows me to get a JSON of the movie's IMDB attributes with a search from the title.  I then added two functions in the "Apps Script" component of the sheet: From here, I could call the function to search (from a cell) with: =API(CONCAT("http://www.omdbapi.com/?apikey=*******&t=",ENCODEURL(A1))) That would return the JSON (assuming A1 is...
Post a Comment
Read more