tailmail

Website
Before
After

Inspiration

Emails are very important to the daily workflow of modern workers. With the flood of emails that we all receive everyday, it is importantly to respond promptly, lest we lose track and completely forget to respond. 'tailmail' is here to give gmail users an incentive to respond to their emails as quickly as possible. It keeps you accountable, keeps your organized.

What it does

Once you open an email, you essentially start a 30 minute timer on yourself. After that time is up, your email is archived and no longer on your inbox.

How I built it

Using the Google API through Python. HTML, CSS, some Flask in the process.

Challenges I ran into

Never worked with APIs before. So it was cool and challenging to work through Google's Developer Docs and make sense of what was going on. We were playing around with Google's Pub/Sub: we were trying to get gmail to send us push notifications through webhooks whenever a user opened a new email, but we couldn't completely figure out how to set it up as of now. We also ran into issue trying to get authentication through a simple website login. And also issue for setting up new server, flask and just everything.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Suneet: have never done something like this.I have only taken 2 of the intro CS classes. So I am very proud of the fact that I had an idea and literally googled stuff and tried to figure out how to do it. There were manny many times where I felt completely helpless but I am overall proud of what we've created so far and look forward to continuing to work on the project.

Simon: I am really excited that I got the opportunity to learn more about flask and the gmail API. I am proud of the hard work Suneet and I put into this project and hope that it will be valuable to users. I am excited about the work we will continue to put into this project!

What I learned

Everything. Learned how to use APIs, how to set up a server, how to set up a database and what actually goes on in the process of trying to build a web-app.