# Making Google Reader Mobile sing using your Gmail inbox for personal productivity to save bookmarks and tweet links

[![Reader Stats: From your 353 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,721 items, clicked 68 items, starred 9 items, and emailed 55 items.](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image_thumb.png "Reader Stats")](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image1.png)I’ve been a long time user of Google Reader. It’s been an up and down relationship even [going through a trial separation](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/11/bye-bye-google-reader/), but I always come back. One of the things I’ve struggled with is a workflow that allows me to share and file interesting posts on the mobile version of Google Reader. I’ve previously experimented with [custom Yahoo Pipes](https://hawksey.info/blog/2009/12/festive-fun-auto-tweeting-google-reader/) and services like [ifttt.com](http://ifttt.com) but find these don’t give me the flexibility in editing tweet text or tags used to bookmark links. The slides below highlight the problem, if I want to personalise how a post is saved/shared you have to navigate out of Google Reader and then you are on reliant on share features of the source post or apps available on your phone. [![Send email from Google Reader Mobile](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture1_thumb.jpg "Send email from Google Reader Mobile")](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture1.jpg)Here’s my solution. As Google Reader mobile has an email option it’s possible to push posts to different services without navigating away and still let you have control over what is saved/tweeted. Initially I considered using existing services which let you create your own workflows by sending stuff to a dedicated email, example services which let you do this that I already use are [Evernote](http://blog.evernote.com/2010/03/16/emailing-into-evernote-just-got-better/) and [ifttt.com](http://ifttt.com/wtf). Instead as there have been a number of Google Apps Script Gmail productivity solutions like Drew Csillag’s (sounds like cheese-log ;) [Calorie Counting with Google Apps Script](http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/calorie-counting-with-google-apps.html) I thought I’d give that technique a go. So I’ve come up with this: **\*\*\*** [**GmailProductivitySheet v1.0 Spreadsheet**](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGkLMU9sHmLdGU4ekE5TXgwdThNNm5kMTIyTy10Q3c&newcopy) **\*\*\***

This solution uses [the old Gmail trick of adding +whateveryouwant to your email address](http://lifehacker.com/144397/instant-disposable-gmail-addresses) to allow you to do custom filtering. For example, if I email m.hawksey+twitter\[at\]gmail.com the message still ends up in my inbox but it makes it easy for me to setup a filter rule. So using Google Apps Script I can [search my Gmail inbox](https://developers.google.com/apps-script/class_gmailapp#search) for messages from me with +twitter, +delicious or +diigo and then using oAuth or basic authentication pass links/messages through those service’s API’s, I hope you agree Google Apps Script at it’s finest. ## Setup/Usage

Here’s a video to help you with setup and usage (recorded in a Google Hangout On Air – [still experimenting to get the best quality](https://hawksey.info/blog/2012/06/some-quick-notes-on-google-hangouts-on-air/)) In summary, if I want to tweet something then I email the link to *mygmailaccount*+twitter@gmail.com, to save a bookmark either *mygmailaccount*+delicious@gmail.com or *mygmailaccount*+diigo@gmail.com, or any combination of the three by sending the message to the email address. ![Google Reader Productivity Flow](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/GmailProductivity.jpg "Google Reader Productivity Flow")BTW if you are worried I’m wasting JISC CETIS time to make this fear not as this was an out of hours project. I also feel slightly annoyed with myself for spending so much time taking what was a functional solution (couple of hours work) and trying to make it more user-friendly for re-use particularly as the payback is minimal. Ho-hum.