Auto-extracting email data into Google Sheets spreadsheet

[Emma_Galaxy]

I get daily emails from my custom application that contain identical content except for changing numeric values (like 5 vs 3). I want to create an automated system that pulls this data and populates my spreadsheet report.

function extractEmailData() {
  var emailThread = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName("").getThreads(0,1)[0];
  var emailMessage = emailThread.getMessages()[0];
  Logger.log(emailMessage.getBody());
}

However, this approach is not functioning properly. Can someone help me figure out what’s going wrong with my implementation?

[RunningRiver]

Your main problem is the empty string in getUserLabelByName("") - that’ll throw an error since you’re not specifying which Gmail label to check. You need to put in an actual label name that has the emails you want to process. Also, your code only handles one email thread, but for daily automation you’ll want to process multiple messages. I’ve worked with similar email parsing setups before - regex works great for pulling out those numeric values. You should add error handling too, in case the label doesn’t exist or is empty. For the daily automation part, just set up a time-driven trigger in Google Apps Script. Make sure you test this thoroughly with your actual emails since the parsing has to match your app’s email format exactly.

[AdventurousHiker17]

you’re missing the label name, but i’d skip that whole approach anyway. just use GmailApp.getInboxThreads() to grab recent emails, then filter by sender or subject. much simpler than messing with labels. once you’ve got the email body, use regex to extract the numbers - /\d+/g will pull out all numeric values.

[John_Fast]

Your problem is how you’re accessing Gmail threads. That empty label name will break things, but there’s a better way to handle this. Skip the labels entirely and search for emails directly using sender or subject patterns. Try GmailApp.search('from:[email protected] newer_than:1d') - it’s way more reliable for daily emails. Use getPlainBody() instead of getBody() when you’re pulling out numbers. If your app sends HTML emails, the plain text version makes regex matching much easier since you won’t have HTML tags messing things up. Don’t forget to add duplicate checking so you don’t process the same email twice when the script runs multiple times.