When my team at work started doing a lot of projects in GitHub, I had trouble keeping up with all the notifications from the issue tracker in Gmail. Which mails were about bugs assigned to me? Bugs that had me in @ mentions? Bugs just from projects I was watching? Couldn’t the labels on the issues also be labels on the issue emails?
I’ve always been a huge fan of Google Apps Script for productivity. You can automate Gmail, spreadsheets, and docs. I’ve used it a lot for processing data in spreadsheets. I decided to combine it with the GitHub API to label the issue tracker mails coming in and help me sort which ones to pay attention to.
The source code for my apps script is here. It runs on a timer, checking for unprocessed mail from GitHub, pulling data about the issue each GitHub mail references from the GitHub API, and using that to add labels. Overall it’s really simple, less than 150 lines of code including all the comments. I’m really excited about how much easier this makes my mail to scan!