GMail – apply labels to email from group members
NOTE: The information in this article has been superceeded by this one.
As Noted by Chris recently on IRC, Google Mail lacks a feature in its ability to automatically label/filter messages - you can’t do it based on emails from people in a contact group, short of adding a filter with all their email address on it.
At the time it was mentioned this didn’t affect me, however later when I got round to adding loads of labels/filters in gmail (yay for, nicely coloured inbox!) to nicely separate things for me I also ran into this problem, so came up with the following python script that does it for me.
It checks messages, sees if the sender is in the contacts, then checks each group to see if there is a label with that group name that is not already set, then checks to see if the contact is in the group, and finally sets the label if everything matches up.
I ran it initially to tag my entire inbox (set checkAllIndex to True change
ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName) to ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName, True))
and now have it running on a 15 minute cron (not using loopMode) to tag new messages for me.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone else, I’m not sure how well it works in general, it worked fine
for me with ~700 messages at first, however after a few runs (due to regrouping some contacts) I was
greeted by an Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected message when trying to do anything -
This went away after about 20 minutes, but don’t say you wern’t warned if it happens to you.
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
This script will login to gmail, and add labels to messages for contact groups.
By default the script will only check items from the past 2 days where email
was received.
Loop mode can be enabled to save logging in repeatedly from cron.
Loop mode may fail after some time if Google kills the session, or gmail
becomes unavailable or so. (Untested in these situations). On the other hand
it may also just keep running indefinitely as if no problem occurred, loop mode
is relatively untested and was added as an after thought.
When running in loop mode, it is best to have a crontab entry also that checks
and restarts the script if it dies.
Copyright 2008 Shane 'Dataforce' Mc Cormack
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
"""
# Uncomment the lines below if python can't find libgmail on its own, and edit
# the sys,path.insert to point to where libgmail.py is.
# import sys
# sys.path.insert(0, 'libgmail')
import libgmail
import time
###############################################################################
# Configuration
###############################################################################
# Email Address
email = "YOUR EMAIL HERE"
# Password
password = "YOUR PASS HERE"
# Check all on index, rather than just the first 2 dates found
checkAllIndex = False
# Use Loop (if true the script will keep looping, and sleep between checking
# for new mail to modify)
useLoop = False
# Time in seconds to sleep when looping (300 = 5 mins)
loopTime = 300
# Label Prefix - if group-based labeles are prefixed, set the prefix here.
# (eg "Groups/")
labelPrefix = ""
# What folder to check? ('inbox' or 'all' are probbaly the most common settings)
folderName = 'inbox'
###############################################################################
# Helper classes/methods
###############################################################################
class ContactGroup:
def __init__(self, id, name, contacts):
self.id = id
self.name = name
self.contacts = contacts
def containsContact(self, contact):
for knownContact in self.contacts:
if knownContact[0] == contact.id:
return True
return False
def __str__(self):
return self.name
# Get Contacts and Groups
# Modified from libgmail 0.1.10 to include groups aswell
def getContacts(account):
"""
Returns a GmailContactList object
that has all the contacts in it as
GmailContacts
"""
contactList = []
groupList = []
# pnl = a is necessary to get *all* contacts
myUrl = libgmail._buildURL(view='cl',search='contacts', pnl='a')
myData = account._parsePage(myUrl)
# This comes back with a dictionary
# with entry 'cl'
addresses = myData['cl']
# Now loop through the addresses and get the contacts
for entry in addresses:
if len(entry) >= 6 and entry[0]=='ce':
newGmailContact = libgmail.GmailContact(entry[1], entry[2], entry[4], entry[5])
contactList.append(newGmailContact)
contacts = libgmail.GmailContactList(contactList)
# And now, the groups
for entry in addresses:
if entry[0]=='cle':
newGroup = ContactGroup(entry[1], entry[2], entry[5])
groupList.append(newGroup)
return contacts, groupList
###############################################################################
# Setup
###############################################################################
print "Running.."
print "Use Loop:", useLoop
if useLoop:
print " Loop Time:", loopTime
print "Check all on index:", checkAllIndex
print "Label Prefix:", labelPrefix
print "Checking Folder:", folderName
print "libgmail Version:", libgmail.Version
print ""
# Login to gmail
print "Logging in as", email
ga = libgmail.GmailAccount(email, password)
ga.login()
# Loop at least once.
loop = True;
while loop:
loop = useLoop
print "Getting label names.."
# Get Labels
labels = ga.getLabelNames(refresh=True)
# Get Messages
print "Getting messages.."
inbox = ga.getMessagesByFolder(folderName)
# Get Contacts
print "Getting contacts and groups"
contacts, groups = getContacts(ga)
# Check each thread in the inbox
lastDate = '';
secondDate = False;
for thread in inbox:
# Only check dates we are supposed to.
if not checkAllIndex:
# Get the date
threadDate = thread.__getattr__('date');
# Make sure a date is set
if lastDate == '':
lastDate = threadDate
# If this date is different to the last one do something.
if lastDate != threadDate:
# If we are already on the second date, then we stop now
if secondDate:
break;
# Otherwise, if the new data is a non-time date, we can change to the
# second date.
elif "am" not in threadDate and "pm" not in threadDate:
lastDate = threadDate
secondDate = True
print "Thread:", thread.id, len(thread), thread.subject, thread.getLabels(), thread.__getattr__('date'), thread._authors, thread.__getattr__('unread')
try:
# Current Labels
threadCurrentLabels = thread.getLabels();
# We will add labels here first to prevent dupes
threadLabels = set([])
# Check each message in the thread.
for msg in thread:
print " Message:", msg.id, msg.sender
# Check if sender is a known contact
contact = contacts.getContactByEmail(msg.sender)
if contact != False:
# Check each group for this contact
for group in groups:
# If we have a label with this group name
labelName = labelPrefix+group.name
if (labelName in labels) and (labelName not in threadCurrentLabels):
# And the group contains the contact we want
if group.containsContact(contact):
# Add it to the list
print " Sender Label:", labelName
threadLabels.add(labelName)
except Exception, detail:
print " Error parsing messages:", type(detail), detail
# Now add the labels
for label in threadLabels:
print " Adding Label:", label
thread.addLabel(label)
# If thread was unread, make it unread again.
if thread.__getattr__('unread'):
print " Remarking as unread"
ga._doThreadAction("ur", thread)
if loop:
print ""
print "Sleeping"
time.sleep(loopTime)
else:
print "Done"On a related note, I’ve also recently started to use the “Better Gmail 2” addon for firefox (Official page seems down atm, but more info here) mostly for the grouping of labels feature.
Edit: Script will now preserve unread status of threads.