gmail-list is a node.js command line utility that uses the Gmail API to list metadata for all the emails in your inbox. It’s useful for performing data science on your own email data set.
Currently, gmail-list outputs a list of senders for the top 300 emails in your inbox. It looks like this:
$ node index.js
The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Zapier <contact@zapier.io>
Firebase <firebase-no-reply@google.com>
Twitter <verify@twitter.com>
...
You can modify list.js to output different kinds of information; see the Gmail API Reference Documentation.
I recently began using gmailctl to manage my Gmail filters. With gmail-list I can generate a count of each email address and how many times it has sent me email; from this list I can continuously configure my filters to capture more newsletters and other automated emails.
- git clone this repository
npm install- The only dependency that needs to be installed is
googleapis@39
- The only dependency that needs to be installed is
- Go to the Google Developers Gmail Quickstart and click
Enable the Gmail APIto generate acredentials.jsonfile that you should put in this directory - Run
node index.jsand follow the instructions presented to obtain authorization tokens for your Google account (only needs to be done once, stored locally intoken.json) - Run
node index.jsagain to generate a newline-separated list of sender addresses from the last 300 emails in your inbox
gmail-list can be combined with other bash utilities to gain insights.
Save the sender addresses to a file:
node index.js > out.txt
Sort the file and provide a count of how many times each address appears:
cat out.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -r > out-sorted.txt
End result:
16 The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
11 Top Stonks <noreply@topstonks.io>
2 Firebase <firebase@google.com>
...
- Add command line arguments to change the search query (currently “is:inbox” and max search results (currently 300)
- Add ability to pick which metadata to display (currently only sender address, but could be subject, date, or other headers available through the API)
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2020 Andi Andreas
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