Goodbye Email Clutter: Google Apps Script Hack!

Have you heard of Google Apps Script? I had not, but I guess it's been around for a long time and I think it's super, super cool. So I discovered it the other day when I was looking for ways to automate my email management. I happen to use Gmail. I've got Google Workspace for my email, and I found out that this free script called Google Apps Script is all the bomb. It does everything that I tried to do in Make.com, which is paid, and it failed miserably. But the Google Apps Script is working really well. So if you hang out, I will go ahead and bring it up on my computer and show you how it works. And now I'm going to access Google Apps Script and show you how to find it. So you just come to Google, be logged in, and go to the square of 9 dots up in the corner next to your picture and choose Google Drive. This will bring up your drive. Up here in the corner, you want to click New and then go down to the More tab, and you're going to go down to Google Apps Script. And this is going to give you a blank area where you can create your script and you just simply copy and paste it in here. And if you're like me, I have never written a script in my life. I wouldn't know where to start. I don't know all the syntax. I know all the stuff that's going through your head. I don't know how to do this, Dotty. If someone put a gun to my head, I would not know how to do it. To do this. So I simply went to ChatGPT, and you can use Claude, you could use Gemini, anyone you want, and tell it what you want it to do. So Google Apps Script can access your email. It can access Google Sheets and Google Docs, basically the whole Google environment. And so what do you want to do? I currently only have one running, which is my Gmail. You can come in here and make as many as you want. So you just go to your favorite AI tool and you say, this is what I want to do. Because it was the first time I'd done this, I didn't really know what to do. And so I just gave it an overview of what I wanted and it created the script. I put it in and I'm like, oh, maybe I would rather have it do this and this. So if you map out what you actually want it to do, so as far as your Gmail goes, and this is free Gmail, paid Workspace, it's all the same. Figure out what folders you're going to use and what you want separated out of your email. So I really wanted all emails sent from a client to be up front and center. All of the advertising promotional kind of stuff gone out of my inbox so that I can choose to go look at it if I want. It's not deleted. And there's a few other separations that I wanted or categorizations. So sit down, write down the labels, create the labels if you don't have them already, and then tell your AI program exactly what you want, it'll give you a script. You'll literally copy and paste it in here. When there's something in here, this save button, which is right here, will be active and you can go ahead and save it. If there's any errors in it, it will actually tell you the error before it saves. It won't save as long as that error's there. You simply go back to your AI program and you say, hey, I got this error. What do I do? It will fix it for you. And then you copy and paste in there again, save it, and you're good to go. Now I have it because I wanted to separate out clients. It's by email. So I entered in the clients that I'm working with right now. Their email addresses are in a certain area of the script, so it will always flag those and leave them up top so that I can see them front and center. I'm not missing anything. And over the week, I've only been using this for a week. As other clients have sent me things, I've just taken their email address, dropped it into the script, resaved it, and now it's saved in there. So this will be an ongoing thing for me. Over the last week, my email has been so much more manageable. I am wasting very little time on email. These days because the script is fantastic. What I also like about it is that it is within the whole Google environment. So I'm not connecting ChatGPT to my email and having it filter through and read things and sort things out for me. Because I didn't feel comfortable with an AI program actually accessing my email. Call me old, whatever, not comfortable with it. So that's a bonus. It doesn't do that. I'm not using Make or N8N, which are paid programs that can do the same things, but again, it's exposing my email to these other programs. This is all within the Google environment. So I'm so happy with it. I hope that you can get the same results. Leave in the comments your experience with this. I'm loving it. Are you loving it?