Sending a canned response with Gmail Apps Script

Question

I'm writing an auto-replying tool for gmail using Google Apps Script (http://script.google.com).

In the docs, I don't find any function to send a Gmail canned response. Is there no such feature?

If not, how would you handle this? I thought about sending an email to myself in gmail:

To:[email protected]
From:[email protected]
Subject:This is a canned response ID1847
Hi
This is a test

adding the label mycannedresponse to it, and then loading in Apps Script this mail from code:

var threads = GmailApp.search("label:mycannedresponse ID1847");
if (threads.length != 1) { 
    // error: the canned response ID... is not unique
} else {
    threads[0].getBody(...)
    threads[0].getPlainBody(...)
}

Is there a more-documented way to do it?

Not very surprising: there are many features available through the interface that Apps Script doesn't have methods for. I'd either hardcode canned responses or store them in some spreadsheet for ease of editing. — user6655984

David Loyd David Loyd · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-30T17:03:13

Have you seen the sendEmail method for GAS? You can create a trigger to fire off this email.

 // The code below will send an email with the current date and time.
var now = new Date();
GmailApp.sendEmail("[email protected]", "current time", "The time is: " + now.toString());

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/gmail/gmail-app#sendemailrecipient-subject-body

Sending a canned response with Gmail Apps Script

1 Answers