Autohotkey Script – send email to Google Calendar!
I received a request from Dave on this one – Thanks Dave! – and I couldn’t resist trying to do it. Here is the Frankenstein-like result:
What the program does
This program is for emailing new events to your Google Calendar. It checks your Gmail account for new events that were sent to a special label every ten seconds. It can only process one calendar entry every ten seconds (but if you’r emailing in more than that, it’s pretty impressive and you are far too busy to be playing with my software).
I couldn’t find any 3rd party services that do this, so I had to improvise using AutoHotKey and a script I wrote previously for quick adding events to Google calendar. The result is a bit rickety, but it does the job. Improvements may or may not occur over time and currently it does not work with google apps (although it couldn’t be that hard to fix this).
Setup
It requires three pieces of setup (these are the defaults which can be modified if you know how to script):
1. Create a Gmail filter that puts take email sent to youraddress+jaacal@gmail.com into a new folder/label called jaacal. You can also say “skip the inbox” so these emails don’t clutter things up.
2. Download the zip file from this link – Email to Google Calendar (93) – and unpack it to a directory of your choosing.
3. Change the logon.txt file to include your email, your user name (email without @gmail.com) and your password. Make sure you keep this file in the same folder as the EXE file.
Workin’ it
Once you’ve done these three steps, run the EXE file and walk away. Send an email with your quick add text in the subject line to the address above and it will appear on your calendar within about 20 seconds. An example of a quick add subject line could be something like “dinner with Dave to thank him for such a good idea tommorrow 10pm”. It doesn’t matter what you put in the body, the program will just ignore it.
Download Email to Google Calendar (93)
And that’s about it! Let me know your thoughts at ab@justanasterisk.com or in the comments.
~ab
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Thanks for making this, it works great! It took a while to figure out the address+jaacal@gmail.com thing. I didn’t actually get that working, but a filter getting email from my address and with “has the words: jaacal” works just as well.
Not knowing how the rss feed thing works, I was wondering if it would be possible to do a loop where it checks all the feed entries until it finds the last one previously found. That way you could run this once a day (e.g. first thing in the morning) for a few minutes to catch up on any calendar entries. Also that way you wouldn’t have to have a computer always running in order to catch every entry emailed from your phone.
Again, thanks – this fills a real need :-)
The RSS feed thing is pretty simple – the program I wrote takes the term you put in (like title) and the instance of that term, (between 1,2 would be the first instance) and grabs it as a variable.
Although I thought of trying to loop through to the last one sent, I figured that I’d check how system performance was running every 10 seconds first. Finding that it didn’t cause any problems, I went the lazy route. If there is enough interest in the program, I’ll probably make a stab at the magical loop.
Glad to hear it’s what you needed!
~ab