IT Lesson

Find Unanswered Emails with Apps Script

Editor’s Note: Guest author Alex Moore is the CEO of Baydin, an email productivity company. --Arun Nagarajan

As the CEO of an email productivity company, not a day goes by when I don’t learn about a new email pain point. I love solving email problems for our customers, but many of their problems do not lend themselves to a full browser-extension and server solution, like the products we make. Apps Script is perfect for solving some of these problems in a quick, lightweight, customizable way.

The Awaiting Response script is a perfect example of one of these solutions. My friend Matt Galligan, the CEO of Circa, tweeted a few months back that he wanted a way to find all of the messages that he sent that did not receive a reply.

Boomerang, our flagship extension, provides a way to bring a single message back to your attention if it doesn’t get a response. But Boomerang is not designed for this particular issue — to use Boomerang in this way, you’d need to move every message youd ever sent back to your inbox! Instead, it makes more sense to create a label and use Apps Script to apply it to each of these messages.

The Awaiting Response script searches the Sent folder to identify all messages you sent over the previous week. It then checks each thread to determine if someone else replied to your message. If no one has, the script applies the label AwaitingResponse to the message. You can then easily visit that label to see all those messages in a single glance.

var d = new Date();
d.setDate(d.getDate() - DAYS_TO_SEARCH);
var dateString = d.getFullYe

ar() + "/" + (d.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + d.getDate();
threads = GmailApp.search("in:Sent after:" + dateString);

Apps Script provides access to the full power of Gmail search, right from within your script. This snippet uses Javascript’s Date object to construct a Gmail-formatted search query that finds all of the conversations where you’ve sent a message in the last DAYS_TO_SEARCH days. It then loads the results of that search into an array of Thread objects.

var userEmailAddress = Session.getEffectiveUser().getEmail();
var EMAIL_REGEX = /[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+.[a-z.A-Z]+/g;

# if the label already exists, createLabel will return the existing label
var label = GmailApp.createLabel("AwaitingResponse");

var threadsToUpdate = [];
for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++)
{
  var thread = threads[i];
  var lastMessage = thread.getMessages()[thread.getMessageCount()-1];
  lastMessageSender = lastMessage.getFrom().match(EMAIL_REGEX)[0];
  if (lastMessageSender == userEmailAddress)
  {
    threadsToUpdate.push[thread];
  }
}

label.addToThreads(threads)

And this part of the script is where the heavy lifting happens. We iterate through each message in the list of search results, applying a regular expression to the From header in the message to extract the sender’s email address. We compare the sender’s address to the script user’s email address. If they don’t match, we know someone else sent the last message in the conversation. So we apply the AwaitingResponse label to the conversation. If the script user sent the last message, we simply move along to the next message.

Add in a little bit of glue and a couple configuration options, and you have a flexible, simple script that gives you the superpower of always knowing which messages might need you to check back in.

Matt adapted his own version of the script to run automatically each day and to only apply the label to messages sent more recently than the last week.

He has also set up the script to exclude messages that include labels where, for example, he has already used Boomerang to track the messages for later. It would also be a snap to update the script to handle aliases (for example, if you use your Gmail account to send a message using your corporate email address) or to look for messages that require a reply from you.

You can get the script here. To customize it, just create your own copy and edit it right inside the built-in editor. With Awaiting Response, Apps Script helped us solve a customer problem in about fifteen minutes, without having to build an entire product.

Alex Moore is the CEO of Baydin, an email productivity company. Baydin makes software that combines AI and behavioral science to ease the burden on overloaded emailers, including the popular Boomerang email scheduling extension, which has been downloaded over two million times. When taking a break from his email, Alex makes a chicken florentine that tastes like angels singing. He is a rabid Alabama football fan.

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler