Create Google Tasks by sending email to Google GMail

Goal:

• Send email to a specified address - in this case to Gmail address named yourgmail+task@gmail.com. (If Gmail ID is ittichai, the email to send to will be ittichai+task@gmail.com.) Read more about hidden feature with Gmail - http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html
• Script will parse that email based on Gmail label assigned by filter, and grab the email's subject to create a new Google task.

Follow this step-by-step of this page. http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro/blog/2011/10/automated-email-to-task-mechanism-with-google-apps-script/

This is just an overview of what happens:

1. Create Gmail new labels - newtask and newtaskdone.
2. Create Gmail filter based on newtask label.
3. Create script from Google Spreadsheet. Make sure that the name of the task list in TASKLIST variable is changed to yours.
4. Integrate the script with Google API.
5. Schedule it via the time-driven even trigger.

Pay attention to the *Integrate the script with Google API* in the *Script Code* section especially if this is your first time coding this. You will have to enable Google API service to allow access the Task API - https://developers.google.com/apps-script/articles/google_apis_reading_list. If not doing so, you will receive an error message saying "Tasks - not defined" when running the script.

In addition to above sample, I'd like to add the email's body into the G! task's note.

Here is what I do:

• Add a new variable to grab the email's body

        // Grab the task data  
        var taskTitle = thread.getFirstMessageSubject();  
        var taskNote = getTextFromHtml((thread.getMessages()[0]).getBody());

Most email message now is HTML-based. Without stripping out the HTML tags, the task's note will be populated with many useless tags. I use functions mentioned on this web site http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8936092/remove-formatting-tags-from-string-body-of-email to get only text message. Basically, add these two functions in the script.

function getTextFromHtml(html) {
  return getTextFromNode(Xml.parse(html, true).getElement());
}

function getTextFromNode(x) {
  switch(x.toString()) {
    case 'XmlText': return x.toXmlString();
    case 'XmlElement': return x.getNodes().map(getTextFromNode).join('');
    default: return '';
  }
}

• Add new parameter of task's note to addTask_

        // Insert the task  
        //addTask_(taskTitle, TASKLIST);  
        addTask_(taskTitle, taskNote, TASKLIST);  

• Update the addTask_ to include setNotes

    function addTask_(title, message, tasklistId) {  
      //var newTask = Tasks.newTask().setTitle(title);  
      var newTask = Tasks.newTask().setTitle(title).setNotes(message);  
      Tasks.Tasks.insert(newTask, getTasklistId_(tasklistId));  
    }