Recurring Email With Google Drive and AWS Lambda Function (Python)
I recently had to set up a recurring an email that had to be sent once every month to myself and group of friends. I’ll break this into parts for people that get discourage by seeing very long Medium posts. This is tutorial is broken up into 5 parts:
- Introduction — This page. We talk about other alternatives (possibly paid)
- Sending an email from AWS Lambda
- Adding a trigger to your AWS Lambda function
- Setting Up a Project, Service Accounts and OAuth Credentials
- Integrate Google Sheets to extract mail contents and email addresses
I had hoped that gmail would have some functionality that I do not know about, after all, I did not know that one could schedule an email to be sent later in gmail. After 5 minutes of going through gmail functionality, as always, I turned to Google and Quora to give me the answer of how I can set up a recurring email. I found the this Quora question (https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-out-a-recurring-email-regularly-using-Gmail)and learnt the following from it:
- “Gmail does not natively have the ability to send out recurring email” —
Bryce M. Petit - You can use a tool like Boomerang, but “Looks like Boomerang now charges for recurring : (” — Blake Hampson,
- You can probably get a Chrome plugin, but you’d probably have to pay for that also.
After an hour of trying and failing to setup some of the free services, I decided to write my own AWS Lambda function. The main reason for this to take advantage of the AWS Lambda free usage team of which at this point was: “1M free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month.” Find latest AWS Lambda Pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/.
In the next section, we’ll be sending email from AWS Lambda. Click here to go to the next section.
