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Why NylasHow to delete emails with the Gmail API and Ruby
Looking forward to Inbox Zero? This guide will help you out cleaning up your Gmail account using Ruby and Sinatra
Looking forward to Inbox Zero? This guide will help you out cleaning up your Gmail account using Ruby and Sinatra
Getting your inbox to Inbox Zero, is something that most people want to do, although that’s not easy to accomplish most of the time, as we might need to delete multiple emails multiple times per day. Gladly, with the help of the Nylas Email API and Ruby, we can build a project to help reach that goal faster by providing email deletion.
If you already have the Nylas Ruby SDK installed and your Python environment configured, continue with the blog.
Otherwise, I recommend reading the post How to Send Emails with the Nylas Ruby SDK where the basic setup is clearly explained.
Our application starts with a screen displaying some parameters that we have to filter our email inbox. We can specify the email status, who sent the emails, what’s the subject and the emails that were sent after a certain date:
Once we specify a couple of parameters, we’re going to get how many emails satisfy the conditions:
Here we have only one email that we can delete. If we had 20 or 50 more emails, we could also choose to delete them all.
Once the email or emails have been deleted, passing the same parameters will return zero emails.
By the way, the Nylas Email API request endpoint has a hard limit of one hundred emails per request.
As we want to create a Flask web application, our best option is to use Sinatra, one of the most popular Micro Frameworks in the Python world:
$ gem install sinatra $ gem install webrick
Once installed, we’re ready to go.
Let’s see how we can delete our Gmail emails using Ruby.
First, we’re going to create a folder called Delete_Gmail, and inside, we’re going to create a folder called views.
Create a file called delete_gmail.rb with the following source code:
# frozen_string_literal: true
# Import your dependencies
require 'sinatra'
require 'dotenv/load'
require 'nylas'
# Use sessions
enable :sessions
# Initialize your Nylas API client
nylas = Nylas::API.new(
app_id: ENV['CLIENT_ID'],
app_secret: ENV['CLIENT_SECRET'],
access_token: ENV['ACCESS_TOKEN']
)
# Main page with form
get '/' do
# Create a hash to store labels information
labelsDict = Hash.new
# Get all labels
labels = nylas.labels
# Clear the emails session variable
session[:emails] = []
# Loop labels and assign them to the hash
for label in labels
labelsDict[label.name] = label.id
end
# Store the "trash" id on the trash session variable
session[:trash] = labelsDict["trash"]
# Call our main page
erb :main, layout: :layout
end
post '/' do
# When we press submit, get all the parameters
# Create a string with all the parameters
# that are not empty
query = "in: inbox; unread: " + params[:read_unread] + ";"
if params[:from] != ""
query = query + " from: " + params[:from] + ";"
end
if params[:subject] != ""
query = query + " subject: " + params[:subject] + ";"
end
if params[:received] != ""
qYear = Date.strptime(params[:received],'%Y-%m-%d').strftime('%Y')
qMonth = Date.strptime(params[:received],'%Y-%m-%d').strftime('%m')
qDay = Date.strptime(params[:received],'%Y-%m-%d').strftime('%d')
uDate = Time.local(qYear, qMonth, qDay, 0, 0,0).strftime("%s")
query = query + " received_after: " + uDate + ";"
end
query = query.chomp(";")
# Here we grab the params string and turn it into a hash format
pairs = query.split(/[:;]/).map(&:strip).each_slice(2).map { |k,v| [k.strip.to_sym, v.strip] }
# Make it a hash
result = Hash[pairs]
# Call the messages endpoint with the params hash
emails = nylas.messages.where(result)
emails_array = []
email_titles = []
for email in emails
# Store the email id and email subject
emails_array.push(email.id)
email_titles.push(email.subject)
end
# Fill emails session variables with the array of emails
session[:emails] = emails_array
# Call the filtered page passing the number of emails and the titles
erb :filtered, layout: :layout, locals: { count: emails_array.length(), titles: email_titles}
end
# When we press the delete button
post '/delete' do
# Get the emails from the session variable
emails_array = session[:emails]
# Clean the emails session variable
session[:emails] = []
# For each email
for email in emails_array
# Get the email information based on the id
message = nylas.messages.find(email)
# Update the label of the email
message.update(label_ids: [session[:trash]])
# Save the email
message.save
end
# Go back to the main page
redirect "/"
end
Inside the views folder, we need to create three different files. Let’s start with layout.erb:
<html> <head> <script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script> <title>Delete Gmail Emails</title> </head> <body> <%= yield %> </body> </html>
Then main.erb:
<div class="bg-[#315acb] border-green-600 border-b p-4 m-4 rounded grid place-items-center"> <p class="text-4xl">Gmail Deleter</p> <form method="post"> <br> <table> <tr> <td><p class="font-bold">Email Status:</p></td> <td><input type="radio" id="read" name="read_unread" value="false" checked> <label for="read" class="font-bold">read emails</label><br> <input type="radio" id="unread" name="read_unread" value="true"> <label for="unread" class="font-bold">unread emails</label><br></td> </tr> <tr><td><br></td></tr> <tr> <td><label for="from" class="font-bold">From: </label></td> <td><input type="text" name="from" value="" ></input></td> </tr> <tr> <td><label for="subject" class="font-bold">Subject: </label></td> <td><input type="text" name="subject" value="" ></input></td> </tr> <tr> <td><label for="received" class="font-bold">Received after: </label></td> <td><input type="date" id="received" name="received" min="2018-01-01" max="2025-01-01"></td> </tr> </table> <br> <button type="submit" class="block bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white text-lg mx-auto py-2 px-4 rounded-full">Submit</button> </form> </div>
Finally, filtered.erb:
<div class="bg-[#315acb] border-green-600 border-b p-4 m-4 rounded grid place-items-center">
<p class="font-bold">There are <%= count %> email(s). Would you like to delete them?</p><br>
<p>
<% titles.each do |title| %>
<%= title %><br>
<%end %>
</p>
<br>
<form method="post" action="/delete">
<button type="submit" class="block bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white text-lg mx-auto py-2 px-4 rounded-full">Delete</button>
</form>
<button class="block bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white text-lg mx-auto py-2 px-4 rounded-full" onclick="window.location.href='/';">
Cancel
</button>
</div>
And that’s it. We’re ready to roll.
To run our application to delete emails from our Gmail inbox, we just need to type the following on the terminal window:
$ ruby delete_gmail.rb
Our application will be running on port 4567 of localhost, so we just need to open our favourite browser and go to the following address:
http://localhost:4567
Now we can easily delete our Gmail emails using Ruby.
You can sign up Nylas for free and start building!
If you want to learn more about Emails, go to our documentation. Also, don’t miss the action. Join our LiveStream Coding with Nylas:
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Blag aka Alvaro Tejada Galindo is a Senior Developer Advocate at Nylas. He loves learning about programming and sharing knowledge with the community. When he’s not coding, he’s spending time with his wife, daughter and son. He loves Punk Music and reading all sorts of books.
