Gmail Auto-Reader

Automatically downloads all the images from the emails in your inbox to make it appear as though you have opened the message. Useful for mass mailing systems with web pixel tracking.

How it works

Many companies, unviersities, and organizations use web pixel tracking to detect when users open their emails. This works by embedding a tiny image in the message, which your device will download from their server. Since this image is unique and linked to you, it will be logged that you opened the email every time that image is requested. If you would like to show engagament with the emails but do not have time to go through all of them manually, the Gmail Auto Reader is for you. This Python program will download the 100 most recent messages from your inbox, and make HTTP requests to all the images in each email to simulate reading the email. After completing each email, it will tag it with a custom Gmail label to keep track of which emails have been auto-read. Next time you run the program, it can be configured to automatically skip over emails that have already been auto-read for the sake of time efficiency.

Getting started

1. Clone this repo to your local filesystem.

2. Install required Python dependancies with pip:

   pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt
   

3. Follow the steps to setup the Google API here, until you reach the section titled "Install the Google client library". Ensure you add the email address you would like to use for the Gmail Auto Reader to the "Test Users" in the App Registration settings. Save your credentials.json file in your cloned directory.

4. In your Gmail inbox, create a label you would like applied to all emails processed by the Auto Reader. For more info on this visit the Google help page. Make note of the label's name.

5. Open a terminal to your cloned working directory and run labels.py. On the first run, it will open a webpage to authorize your account using Google OAuth. Click "Continue" if you're told the app hasn't been verified. Once complete, your account token will be stored in a token.json file in the program directory.

6. Return to the terminal, and locate the label name you created in Step 4. Copy the label ID displayed to the right (don't include the braces). Store this label ID in a file called label_id in your working directory.

7. In the same terminal, run the auto-reader.py file and follow the instructions in the program.
   NOTE: You can specify the number of messages to search as a command line argument following the script filename. If left blank, it will default to 100.

Example

This will run through the auto reader program using the last 256 messages from your inbox:

python3 auto-reader.py 256