Google Contacts Events Notifier

Receive customized email notifications to alert you about incoming birthdays or other events of your Google contacts.

Have you ever wondered why on Earth would Google Calendar provide a calendar to remind you of your contact birthdays, but without letting you set up notifications for its events?
I did. And after hours of fruitless searching and browsing I found a post in the Google Help Forum which seemed to provide a solution, however it did not quite work.

This project takes inspiration from that code to solve the problem of the missing notifications on Google Calendar Birthday Calendar.

• Google Contacts Events Notifier
  • Note regarding Google Plus integration
  • Installation and setup
  • Additional information
    • Stopping/uninstalling/deleting the script
    • Blacklisting specific events for specific contacts
    • Translation
    • Bug and error reporting, help requests
      • Unresponsive help requests
    • Updating the script
    • Permissions required
  • Contributing
  • License
  • Credits

Note regarding Google Plus integration

This script used to include an option to extract additional info about your contacts from your Google Plus account. As Google Plus is scheduled to be killed between March and April 2019 (see this blog post from Google and this follow up for more details) this feature had to be removed.

If you are using any version of this script up to and including v4.1.0 you might have received one or more emails from Google explaining this and asking you to address this issue in your projects.
If this is the case the only action you need to take regarding GCEN is to update your script to a more recent version (more recent than v4.1.0) and to remove the dependecy from the Google Plus API by:

• Opening your script.
• Clicking on Resources->Advanced Google services in the menu at the top.
• Disabling the Google+ API in the list of available APIs.
• Opening the Google Cloud platform API dashboard with the link provided at the bottom.
• Searching for Google+ API in the search bar at the top.
• Disabling the API by clicking on the Disable button.

Installation and setup

Follow this guide to install and setup the script correctly.

Additional information

Stopping/uninstalling/deleting the script

If you just want to stop receiving the notifications, but want to keep the script for future use just open your script and click Run->notifStop in the menu at the top.

If you want to stop using the script and want to delete it completely follow these steps:

1. Locate the script in Google Drive:
   • It should be in the folder you put it into when you created it.
   • If you deleted the file you can look in the trash folder and recover it from there.
2. Open the script and click Run->notifStop in the menu at the top.
3. In the same menu click Run->notifStatus, then View->Log and confirm that the notifications were stopped successfully.
4. Close the script and open this Google page, find the the script (it should have the name you gave it during installation) and click on "Remove access"
5. If everything went right it should be safe to delete the script file from Google Drive.
   If you want to be extra sure you can wait some days to confirm that no email is sent to you anymore and only then delete the script file: this is up to you.

Blacklisting specific events for specific contacts

There are three event-types for which notifications can be statically enabled/disabled for by editing the settings.notifications.eventTypes configuration variable at the top of the script:

1. Birthday
2. Anniversary
3. Custom

but you can also achieve more fine-grained control per-contact by adding a custom-field when editing a contact (click Add->Custom...), setting the label of that field to notificationBlacklist, and setting its content to a comma-separated list of field-names. In the following example, the script would notify about Fred's birthday but not his anniversary or his SpecialSecretDay due to the blacklist:

• Name -> Fred
• Birthday -> 1 January 1970
• Anniversary -> 31 December 1995
• SpecialSecretDay -> 15 June 2001
• notificationBlacklist -> Anniversary,SpecialSecretDay

To minimize confusion the blacklist matches case-insensitively, so for example ANNIVERSARY, Anniversary, anniversary, or AnNiVeRsArY being in the blacklist will all succeed in preventing anniversary notifications for the contact.

Translation

The text of the email notification can be translated into any language if a translation for that language is provided to the script. Some languages already have a translation, but you can easily add your own.

To learn more about translations (how to create your own one, how to share it with us so that it can be used by other users...) please read the translation guide.

Bug and error reporting, help requests

First of all before submitting a new error, bug or help request, please, verify that you followed the setup instructions to the letter.

To report a bug or an error or to request help with this script please use this project GitHub issue page: the collaborators will be notified immediately and will provide help as soon as possible.

Please follow the template provided (which you can also preview here) when opening a new issue and include:

• A meaningful description of the problem. What did you do? What happened? What did you expect to happen instead?
• A full copy of any error message you received or of the thing that went wrong. Please be advised that it could contain personal information such as your email: obscure or remove them as all the issues and relative messages are publicly visible.

These pieces of information are really necessary: without them nobody will be able to help you.

Unresponsive help requests

If you open a help request issue please do not abandon it until it's been solved and closed. If you want to close it before explicitly state this intention with a message in the issue.

Issues marked with the help request tag that are unresponsive will be sent a reminder message after three days since the last message from the user and the issue will be marked with the unresponsive tag. If the user still does not respond to the issue, after a month the issue will be closed.

If you want to re-open a closed help request issue ask for this by commenting on it.
Only the user which has originally opened the issue can ask for it to be re-opened.

Updating the script

This script is constantly updated to fix bugs and add new features: keeping it updated to the latest version is really easy:

1. Whenever a new stable version is released you will see a line of text at the end of your daily email notification telling you to click on a link to get the latest version;
2. If you do so you will be taken to a page with a description of the new release;
3. The description will contain a precise step by step guide on how to update the script to this version: follow it closely and you should not have any problem;
4. You might want to follow the setup procedure again, because some steps might have been added in the new version since the previous one.
5. After updating the code always click Run->notifStop and Run->notifStart in the top menu to finish the update process.

Note: you might be asked to grant some new permissions to the script. There is nothing wrong with this: it just means that the new version requires some permissions that the previous version did not.
You can read the full list of the permissions and why they are required here

Permissions required

When running the script for the first time or after an update you might be asked by Google to "grant some permissions" to the script. This happens because the script needs your explicit permission to access your data.

This is an exhaustive description of the reason the script needs each of the permissions:

• Manage your Google Contacts
  This lets the script access information about your contacts (names, email addresses, birthdays). The script will not modify any of your contacts.
• Manage your calendars
  This lets the script access your birthday and events calendar. The script will get the events from this calendar only and will never modify any event or calendar.
• Allow this application to run when you are not present
  This is needed to run the script every day at the hour you specified.
• Send email as you
  Obviously this script needs your authorization to send you the email notifications. It won't send any other email to anyone.
• Connect to an external service
  This permission is needed to check for updates and to load the profile images of your contacts.

Contributing

Google Contacts Events Notifier is an open source project: if you want to know how to contribute please read the CONTRIBUTING file.

If you just want to contribute with a translation then the translation guide might be a better place to start.

License

Google Contacts Events Notifier is licensed under the MIT license.

Credits

• GioBonvi (Giorgio Bonvicini) created the project and is primary maintainer;
• Google user ajparag for the code that inspired this project;
• rowanthorpe (Rowan Thorpe), whose help was invaluable: he added many new features, refactored the code heavily and solved many bugs;
• baatochan (Bartosz Rodziewicz), for his various contributions both in solving issues and in adding new features;
• those users who provided translations for the script:
  • rowanthorpe (Rowan Thorpe) and apo-mak - Greek;
  • lboullo0 (Lucas) - Spanish;
  • muzavan (Muhammad Reza Irvanda) - Indonesian;
  • DrKrakower, Simone Sottopietra, shutdown27 (Peter Berweiler) and SuperSandro2000 (Sandro Jäckel) - German;
  • cezarylaksa and baatochan (Bartosz Rodziewicz) - Polish;
  • JayForce, Vinetos (Valentin Chassignol) and krial057 - French;
  • 88scythe - Dutch;
  • miguel-r (Miguel Ribeiro) - Portuguese;
  • AnnaH - Thai;
  • nadyafebi (Nadya Febiana Djojosantoso) and jovanzers (Jovan Ferryal E. F.) - Indonesian;
  • cemysf (Cem Yusuf Aydogdu) - Turkish;
  • MatheusNtg - Brazilian Portuguese;
  • goggenb (Geir-Ove Bøe) - Norwegian;
  • phg98 - Korean;
  • kallanar (Dainius Silvanavičius) - Lithuanian;
  • vladimir-kirillovskiy - Russian;
  • AlesJiranek (Aleš Jiránek) - Czech;
  • alialamshahi (Ali Alamshahi) - Farsi;
  • GisliNielsen (Gisli Nielsen) - Norwegian Bokmål
• all the other contributors who are listed here;