Many, many years ago I used to be a software developer. I loved it, build great software, or after hours of investigation find that bug in the code that made the customer unhappy. In those days, I was convinced I would be a developer for the rest of my life. Code is so easy to understand, it does exactly what you want it to do… at least most of the times 🙂
However, now and then.. I still do some development. Build small tools to make my life easier. One of the tools I build recently is an auto-reply script in GMail. I searched on the internet and could only find one good solution. As stubborn as I am (sometimes), I decided to write my own script in Google App Script. Why/ Because I sometimes love to code 🙂
There is no support or whatever, you are on your own if you are going to use this script! But if you run into issues, maybe I can help you. Just drop me an email. If you improve the script, please let me know so I can add a link to this page. If you have no knowledge about javascript or coding in general, I advise you to look a the solution that I found.
Click here to open the script.
So what does the script do? It checks my Google mailbox, and as soon as a message comes in with a certain subject, it will send automatically a reply. The reply is stored as a draft email. The rules, to check which messages should get a reply, are stored in a Google Sheet. As soon as a message is processed, a label will be assigned: responded.
You have to create a trigger yourself, in the Google App Script IDE. It checks the email, just once an hour. The limit of once an hour is a limit of Google App Script, can’t help it.
There is no user interface, so you need to create the rules directly in Google Sheets file. When you execute the function Init in the file Code.gs, the Google Sheet file and label will be created automatically.
Have fun with it and please let me know if you like it!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.