This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.
What I Built
I have way too many unread emails. My inbox unread number was way too high(353, last time I checked..hehe) and I hated seeing it every time I loaded up Gmail. The call of that sweet sweet "Inbox Zero" was strong. And so I set out to remedy this. Going through my unreads, it was clear that a big contributor was the numerous newsletters I had signed up for. And so this was a very good place to start my inbox zero journey. And thus, newslater..
newslater. is a tool that helps you save email newsletters for later reading. It is built on top of the Google Workspace Add On ecosystem; and therefore will currently only work for users with a Gmail account.
Once the addon is installed via the Google Workspace Marketplace, a user can save newsletters, by simply forwarding the newsletter email to a given email address(in this case a postmark supported inbound email). They can then view, and filter through all saved newsletters at their own leisure by opening up the newslater. addon panel from withtin their Gmail account. That's it!
Demo
To run the add locally, See instructions in the repo
In case you'd like to test without all the setup and running hullabaloo, reach out with your Gmail address and I can have it added as a test account under my Google project.
Code Repository
How I Built It
Tech Stack
- Python3+
- FastAPI
- Postgres
- Postmark
- Ngrok or any other http proxy(for local testing)
- Google Cloud(to deploy/test the workspace add-on)
The add-on consists of a FastAPI backend to handle the saving, and reading logic paired with a Postgres database for storage. It also takes advantage of Postmark to handle emails; the only avenue for saving your favourite newsletters on newslater..
Postmark provides a means for parsing forwarded newsletter emails, which are then forwarded to a callback url for processing and storage. Postmark was joy to setup as it barely took more then 3 steps start testing the parsing once my account had been approved. Of note is that Postmark only works with private domains so gmail/Yahoo/Outlook won't work(Wasn't a fan of this but understood why it was necessary).
This was also a great opportunity for me to try out FastAPI, which I've had good things about. I was not dissapointed.
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