Amit Agarwal | The Blog Pros

October 24, 2018

Help Locate your own Email Message in Someone Else’s Gmail

You’ve sent an important email to a colleague but it is lost in the deluge of emails they receive every day, buried and forgotten. They can obviously use Gmail search operators, like FROM: or SUBJECT:, to locate that email later but wouldn’t it be useful if there were a way to directly locate that one missing email in their mailbox.

Well, there’s an alternate search trick and the sender can actually help the recipient find any specific email message that they have sent in the past.

When you send an email through Gmail, a unique Message ID is added to the email header as per the RFC 822 specification. To know the ID of your message, open the email inside Gmail, go to 3-dot menu and choose Show Original. The Message-ID will be displayed in the first line of the header as shown the screenshot.

The Message ID of a particular email message is exactly the same for both the sender and the recipient. That means if the recipient opens the header of your email in their mailbox, the message ID will match that of the message in your Gmail sent folder.

Gmail offers a lesser-known search operator – rfc822msgid – that helps you search emails by their message ID.

So if our message ID is xyz@mail.gmail.com, a simple search like rfc8222msgid:xyz@mail.gmail.com will return the exact email in search results.

And that’s the trick. This search query will work for both the recipient and the email sender. So if you pass the message ID to the recipient, they can simply use the rfc822msgid operator to locate a specific email from you in their own mailbox.

Since the recipient ID is too complex, you can simply copy of the URL of the Gmail search page and pass them to the recipient. The URL will work for them as well since the Message ID is the same for them as well.

You can also use this search trick to bookmark emails in the browser.

Also see: Send Personalized Emails with Gmail

The post Help Locate your own Email Message in Someone Else’s Gmail appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

September 18, 2018

The Best Places to Download HTML Templates for your Website

Are you looking for responsive, beautiful and professional looking HTML templates for your next website but don’t have the budget? Well, here are a couple of free resources on the Internet where you can regularly find good templates for use in your web projects without restrictions.

Dribble is a popular community of designers for them to showcase their work online. In addition to posting screenshots of their work, designers also upload the HTML / CSS version of their projects for anyone to use. You should bookmark the freebie and the freebies tag on Dribble to never miss these projects.

Creative Market is a marketplace for website templates, themes, fonts and other design assets. It is a paid store but if you join their email newsletter, they’ll send you free design stuff every week in your inbox that can be downloaded directly to your Dropbox. And they are mostly good.

HTML5 UP is created by the same developer that built Carrd, one of the most useful websites on the Internet. HTML5 UP is a treasure house of beautiful templates built sans the heavy Bootstrap or Material framework. All web templates are available in the Creative Commons license so can you can use them in any way with attribution.

Envato’s Themes Forest is a premium marketplace for website templates but if create a free account with them, you get to download all the freebies that are published on their homepage every few weeks. These are paid items that the authors have made free only during the duration of the promotion to gain visibility in the marketplace.

OnePageLove is a curated directory of single page websites and they have a dedicated section for HTML templates that are free to download.

UpLabs is another online marketplace and community where creative designers share their work. The “web” section offers a variety of HTML templates that are free for both personal and commercial use.

Manoela Ilic’s Codrops houses the most creative collection of work for web designers as well as developers. Every single project on this site, be it an image slider or a checkout page, is unlike anything you’ve seen before and the source code is up for grabs on Github.

Freebiesbug, as the name suggests, curates web freebies including fonts, PSD designs, stock photos and, of course, HTML templates. Look for the “exclusive” tag and you’ll discover HTML/CSS templates that the designers have chosen to share exclusively on this website.

And the final resource in my list that is worth adding to your bookmarks is Codepen. Chris Coyier started Codepen as a playground for writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the web browser but the project has evolved into a huge community of front-end developers that are putting the code in public which are free to fork and download.

PS: If you are aware of any good resource for free web templates that we missed in the above list, please let me know at amit@labnol.org – thanks!

The post The Best Places to Download HTML Templates for your Website appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

September 17, 2018

How to Delete Older Emails in Gmail Automatically

Microsoft Outlook has an interesting Auto-Sweep feature that lets you automatically deletes older email messages from specific senders after a certain period of time. You can also set up rules that mark older emails as read or you can move emails to different folders based on conditions.

Gmail offers you filters but these filters only work on new incoming emails. You can’t set up a filter in Gmail that will, say, auto-purge all old newsletters emails from your mailbox. Or a filter that will apply a different label to emails after a specific number of days and also mark them as read.

Gmail Auto Purge – Delete Old Mails Automatically

Email Studio is a new Gmail add-on that can help keep your Gmail mailbox lean and tidy with the built-in auto-purge feature. Here are some examples of rules that you can set up for your Gmail with the help of Email Studio:

Delete all emails that were received more than a month ago and are from specific senders or are in a specific folder.
Archive and “Mark as Read” all emails in the inbox folder that are more than 3 months old.
Star emails that are in the “follow up” folder and received more than 2 weeks ago.
Permanently remove all emails from the Gmail trash and the spam folder after 2 days. (Gmail will only clear your spam and trash after 30 days).
Apply the label “follow up” to all starred emails after a week or a month.

The auto-purge utility also includes an email unsubscriber to help you easily remove your email address from unwanted mailing lists and other bulk emails.

How to Enable Auto-Purging in Gmail

To get started, install the Email Studio add-on (video). Next, switch to the Gmail website and open any email message in your inbox. You’ll see the Email Studio icon in the right sidebar.

Open Email Studio, log in with your Gmail account and then choose the “Email Cleanup” tool from the list of available options. Click on “Add new rule” and set up a rule.

There are two parts – you specify a condition and then you specify an action that will be performed on messages that match your condition.

For setting conditions, you can even specify advanced Gmail search operators like newer_than or has:attachment or larger_than to exactly match the Gmail messages that you wish to archive, trash or move to another folder.

Once you have created a rule, click the Save button and Email Studio will launch in the background. It will auto-run every hour, like a cron job, and perform the specified action on email messages that match your condition. There’s no need for you to run the rules manually.

Email Studio is free for basic use but if you wish to create multiple sets of purge rules, please switch to the premium version. It includes email scheduler, forwarder and auto-responder and costs $29 per year.

The post How to Delete Older Emails in Gmail Automatically appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

September 11, 2018

Make your own Saregama Carvaan with YouTube and Google Sheets

Saregama Carvaan, a digital music player that looks like an old-fashioned transistor radio and targets the non-millennial generation, has become a huge hit in India. The company analysed data from online music streaming sites like Saavn, Gaana and YouTube, came up with a catalogue of 5000+ “greatest” Hindi movie songs and pre-loaded them into Carvaan, classified by artists and moods.

Like a radio station, Saregama Carvaan mixes nostalgia with an element of surprise – the player’s algorithm plays music in a random sequence so the listener would never know which song is coming up next. Can the Carvaan experience be recreated with YouTube? Let’s find out.

1. The Songs List

A quick Google search on the Saregama website led me to this PDF document – it contains a complete list of every song that’s bundled into the Carvaan player. I imported the songs PDF into a Google Spreadsheet so the data could be easily filtered by movie names or artistes.

2. The YouTube Database

The YouTube API lets you query the video database by keywords. I wrote a simple Google Script that reads the song titles from the Google Spreadsheet and finds the corresponding video on YouTube. The YouTube API returns the video link, the description, the channel of the video uploader and the thumbnail image (source code).

3. The Spreadsheet Formulae

Google Spreadsheet provides the IMAGE formula that helped me embed the YouTube thumbnail URLs as images into the spreadsheet cells. I used Array Formulas to apply the same formula to the entire column in the spreadsheet.

The YouTube video IDs were converted to the YouTube URLs again with the help of a simple array formula.

=ArrayFormula(CONCAT("https://youtu.be/",D2:D))

4. The YouTube Playlist

Now the spreadsheet was populated with a list of songs that are preloaded into Carvaan and their corresponding YouTube videos.

The next task was to create a YouTube playlist with all the videos. I had earlier built a tool for copying YouTube playlists and the same API was used here for building the playlist inside the spreadsheet (source code).

The Final Result

And here’s the final result – a YouTube playlist with 5000 songs that come bundled with Carvaan. Press the “Shuffle” icon and the songs would play in random sequence continuously.

Useful Links

The post Make your own Saregama Carvaan with YouTube and Google Sheets appeared first on Digital Inspiration.