Automatically Find Unanswered Emails And Add A Label To Them In Gmail

Email is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, a major time hog in our lives, both personal and work. If sending emails or replying to old ones isn’t time consuming enough, you also have to keep track of which emails you sent have gone unanswered so you can send reminders and follow up on them. A week ago Google shared a script on its developer blog to tackle this very problem. The script checks your Sent folder for emails that you sent up to 7 days ago. All emails that you sent out but have not received a reply to are labeled ‘Awaiting Response’ so that it is easier for you to find them.

The script is simple to use; once you install it, click play and grant it permission the first time it is run. Once the script has run, visit the Sent folder in Gmail and you will see which of your emails have not been answered.

The basis for marking an email as ‘Awaiting response’ is that you were the last person, in an email conversation, to send a message and no reply from any of the recipients of that email was received. The script monitors the Sent box only but you can edit the script to monitor other inboxes, to increase the number of days to more than 7, and to exclude emails marked with a certain label. If you have the script check for unanswered emails older than seven days you risk the script slowing down.

In its unedited as-is form, the script does have one shortcoming; the basis for checking if an email went unanswered is who was the last person in the thread to reply to it. If it was you, then the email is marked as Awaiting response even if the conversation itself is over. The script also doesn’t have any triggers so you have to run it manually. You can set up a trigger for it easily though and have it run every day at a specific time. The script can still be run manually. The trigger just automates the process and keeps you from having to remember to do it.

To increase the day limit for checking unanswered email, edit the value for the variable “var DAYS_TO_SEARCH = 7;”. To have the script only check for single emails that have not been replied to, and not emails in a thread, change the value of the variable “var SINGLE_MESSAGE_ONLY = true;” to True.

Get Awaiting Response Script Here

Via Google Apps Developer Blog

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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