Gmail Memories
Author: Nilai Vemula
Goal: Allow a user to log in with gmail and show them a list of emails they received from exactly one year ago
Date: 2/6/2021 - 2/7/2021
What is it?
Gmail Memories is a fun, little tool that allows you to log-in and it will show you a list of emails you received a year ago. Think of it as Google Photos Memories but for Gmail.
How does it work?
Gmail Memories is a Flask App. When you first access the website, you are able to login through Google. All authentication is handled in google_auth.py, and I use the authlib library. The permissions on authentication require access to all Gmail messages and settings, but no data is ever stored permanently. The googleapiclient library is used for generating API requests to the Gmail API. Finally, the data is aggregated and displayed to the user using a basic HTML template.
How can it be better?
Ideally, this would be like Google Photos and this would show up directly in your inbox. For that, maybe I could build a Google Chrome extension, but this Flask app will suffice for now. The design is basic HTML, but it isn't horribly ugly, other than the iframe elements I use to display the email content. The JSON response from the Gmail API also has variable structure, so I am not guaranteed to get the email content. I still have to come up with a better way of parsing the JSON data. Finally, because of how Google handles its API, the service is in test mode and it is invite-only.
Developer details
In order to get this project up and running on your local machine, you will first need to set up a new project on the Google Cloud Platform and generate credentials (Client ID and Client Secret) that you will save as environment variables. Next, you will have to generate a Flask secret key that will also be saved as an environment variable. Finally, you can clone the repository and generate a Python 3.9 virtual environment with the necessary dependencies from requirements.txt. The flask app can be run using the command python app.py.