Tuesday, February 2, 2016

DReaMY GMail Search - Google Sheets Add-on

DReaMY GMail Search

Google sheets add-on


DReaMY (Date Range extended across Multiple Years) Gmail Search enables you to do a search in your gmail account for all messages in a date range (say. 14th Aug to 16th Aug) across multiple years. This is not possible in the native Gmail search bar.


Fig 1: Custom labels will be created in your Gmail account
for the emails matching the search criteria

You can (optionally) add a string to further refine the search.

This helps when you want to search for all messages in a particular date range, but they don't have specific keywords in them, or are sent by many different people.

For example, if you want to search for all your birthday emails, even those that may not have any specific string (like "Happy birthday!") in them, over last 10 years, you can do that easily with this add-on.

When you add this add-on from the add-on store, it'll create an entry within the Sheet menu "Add-ons" item as shown in the figure below:
Fig 2: DReaMY add-on menu

You should see a new sheet called 'DReaMY'. If you do not, please create it by clicking on "Add-ons > DReaMY > Reset Spreadsheet".



Fig 3: Main sheet

The main sheet is shown in the figure above. Enter the date range starting day and month values (only numeric values). Enter the entire year range (say 2004 - 2010) over which the search is to be executed. 

The search string that will be used to perform a Gmail search is shown in red in row #11. If you need to add a further parameter to narrow down the search, you can add it in row #8.

Click "Search" within the menu. The add-on will perform a search and create a new label called "DReaMY" in your Gmail account. Within that label, there will be a label for the date range you selected (starting day/month to ending day/month). Within that label, there will be a label for every year which contains at least 1 email message matching the search parameters. (shown in figure 1 above.)

You can easily remove all the custom labels created by this add-on, as shown in the figure below. No emails will ever be modified or deleted.

Fig. 4

Note: Since the add-on depends on values in specific rows and columns of the sheet, you are not allowed to modify the sheet structure in any way (like add/delete rows, etc). If that is done, it'll throw an error as shown in the figure below:
Fig. 5
The search functionality will be disabled till you reset the worksheet.


Please write to me with your compliments, suggestions or bug reports.

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