Google App Script Emails
Google App Scripts,
Where were you during college when I used Google Documents and Google Sheets for everything? How could I have overlooked your mystical powers? Your abilities to perform complex transformations, generate boilerplate material, and improve my workflows?
But, the past is the past. Let’s get started on the right foot… with a plan and a solution.
The plan I have in mind involves sending automated emails at regular intervals. The solution involves utilizing MailApp service and project triggers. So, how about it? I am assuming, of course, you know how to get started.
MailApp Service
For us to send an email, we must use the MailApp class. This class provides methods for sending emails with varying levels of configurability. For our purposes, we’ll just use the most straight-forward version of the sendEmail method that takes a receipt, subject, and body:
sendEmail("recipient", "subject", "body");
We could call this method as follows…
sendEmail("name@email.com", "Say Hello", "Hello, how are you? This is an automated email from my Google Sheet.");
Now to add a little sophistication (and automation) to our emails with project triggers.
Project Triggers
Project triggers, which are a class of installable triggers, allow us to call user-defined functions at regular intervals. So, have a method for sending an email? We can send it every hour or every day or… whatever your heart desires. But first, we’ll need to define a function:
function sendEmail() {
sendEmail("name@email.com", "Say Hello", "Hello, how are you? This is an automated email from my Google Sheet.");
}
With the function in place, all we have to do is configure a few settings using the Current project’s triggers dialog found in the Resources tab. If we wanted to call this function every day around 3:00 a.m. - 4:00 a.m., then we could use the following settings:
And, that’s it! Now, the project trigger will automatically send an email (using our function) at a regular interval.
This is going to be really fun… I’m really looking forward to getting to know each other better.
Your friend,
Jarrod