Hey everyone,
I’m trying to set up automatic email forwarding using the Gmail API. I want to add some extra content to the original message before sending it on. I’ve looked through Google’s documentation but can’t seem to find any specific examples for this.
Does anyone know if there’s a way to do this? Maybe some sample code or a tutorial that shows how to:
- Grab an incoming email
- Add custom text or data to it
- Forward it to another address
I’m pretty new to working with email APIs, so any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!
def forward_email(service, original_message, new_recipient, extra_content):
# Placeholder function to demonstrate the idea
modified_message = add_content(original_message, extra_content)
send_message(service, modified_message, new_recipient)
# Other helper functions would go here
Has anyone tackled something similar before? What approach did you use?
I’ve actually implemented a similar system for my company. We needed to forward certain emails to our support team with additional context. Here’s what worked for us:
We used the Gmail API’s messages.get to fetch the original email, then parsed it using Python’s email module. The tricky part was modifying the email body without messing up the MIME structure.
For adding custom content, we created a new MIMEMultipart object, copied over the relevant headers, and then added our custom text as a new part before the original body. This way, the extra info shows up at the top of the forwarded email.
One gotcha to watch out for: make sure you handle different content types (plain text, HTML, mixed) correctly. Also, be careful with attachments - you’ll want to preserve those in the forwarded message.
Hope this helps point you in the right direction. Let me know if you need any more specific advice!
I have implemented something similar using the Gmail API. In my experience, the process involves first fetching the original email with messages.get, then parsing the email content using Python’s email library to maintain the MIME formatting. After that, I created a new email message that preserves the necessary headers while appending the custom text to the body. Finally, the modified email is sent using messages.send. This approach works well for both plain text and HTML emails and can be adjusted if attachments are involved.
hey tom, i’ve done smth like this b4. u can use the messages.modify method to add labels, then use filters to auto-forward based on those labels. for adding content, u might need to create a new message from scratch using the original as a template. it’s a bit tricky but doable. good luck!