quack quack. quack.
Quack3Bot is a bot that will frequently check for unread emails with a specific label and send it by Telegram to you, some channel or any other predefined user. To make the it work you will need to create a new bot, create credentials to allow access to your emails, generate the script behind the bot and deploy the script in a digital platform.
Create a bot and discover your chat id.
1.1 - Send the message "/newbot" to the Telegram's official bot manager @BotFather and create your new bot . You should receive a authorization token at the end of the process, keep it safe.
1.2 - The chat id is your identification for the bots. You can discover it by contacting @userinfobot or @jsondumpbot.
Create filters that will apply some label to the wanted emails. You can follow the official guide to create a filter. To create a good filter for the forum notification emails, you can use this example:
- From:
@edisciplinas.usp.br OR list:(@edisciplinas.usp.br) - Has the words:
fóruns - Doesn't have**:
"Este e-mail é a cópia de uma mensagem que foi enviada para você em 'e-Disciplinas'."
** Caution if you are sending these messages to a public channel because sensitive data can be send to you by the same email addresses. The example shows a piece of text presented in notifications of received personal messages from the Moodle that always need to be filtered out.
Create new credentials with http://localhost:8000 as a Authorized redirect URI and get the Client ID and Client secret from it. This part can be confusing because of the the quantity of buttons... You can follow this guide created for the AdWords documentation and add the url http://localhost:8000 at Authorized redirect URIs in step 5.
Notes:
- Make sure you copied
http://localhost:8000exactly as it is. - At the OAuth consent screen you can be asked about the user type among other things. Just fill with default values and select Internal user type. It shoudn't make any difference if you are not sharing the created project with other accounts.
- OAuth Credentials are only one step from accessing all of your Google account, please keep it safe. If anything happens, reset your secret or delete the compromised credential immediately.
Generate your serverless script using the wizard.py script and deploy it to the Cloudflare Workers platform.
4.1 - Download/save the wizard.py script, run it with python wizard.py and follow the instructions.
4.2 - With the copied script in your clipboard create an account at Cloudflare, go to the Workers dashboard and create a new Worker. Delete the existing example code, paste your generated script and click in Save and Deploy.
4.3 - Go to the created Worker settings, on the Triggers tab click in Add Cron Trigger. You can change the expression to whatever you want, if the expression is */5 * * * * for example, the bot will check for new emails every 5 minutes. Remember to save it. There is a nice screenshot in the docs if you are lost.
4.4 - You are done :)
- You may be wondering why it couldn't have a simpler architecture. From my understanding, the only other way to access Gmail outside website is via SMTP, which is not possible without some Docker thing. Because the serverless code is not stateful, in order to read the emails a new access token needs to be requested every time using the fixed refresh token, which needs to be requested via a web server (or something outside browser) with the user's manual confirmation (read the details here).
- Cloudflare Worker platform doesn't have an open-source runtime. Deno Deploy is probably a good open-source option if you want to run the script locally, the platform is still beta but this project is already fully compatible with it.
- Some possible improvements: integrate the chat id discovery with the wizard, make the wizard web page cache expire so the data is really gone when the tab is closed.