Hey, Welcome to React Round Them, the podcast where we keep you updated on all things reacting related. This show is sponsored by Raygun and produced by Topendeves and Void. Top and Deves is where you create top and down, so get top and pay in recognition but working on interesting problems and making meaningful community contributions. And Andoid provides remote design and software development services with a very neat business model. It's a task basis where clients only pay after the tests
are delivered and approved. In today's episode, we will talk about a very interesting tool that can be used to analyze your Gmail mailbox stats so that you can figure out which emails you can delete. And we are talking directly to the author of this library, which is Levan cuts a Zin, the focused software engineer from Georgia of w C and I definitely hope I didn't butcher your name, Elevan, so it's very good to have you on the show.
Thank you for taking time. My name was absolutely correct. Thanks. Well, let's start from the problem I faced right before I worked on this started working on this project. So basically my software package, the Gmail and box stas I created, is basically a solution for the very desirable feature which Gmail does not have basically I think it should have. I mean, Gmail doesn't have the feature to find some statistical information about your mail box, for example,
who sent you most males? Right in other words, sort centers by mail tout also where have you sent most mails? You know, the words sought receivers by mail count and so on. I mean, without this information, it's very difficult to clean up huge mail books without deleting accidentally the leting important males, especially if you have thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands males in
your Gmail. Right. Many people have so much, so much mail in their Gmail and cleaning up and taking and cleaning up to have some space, it's very difficult for them. And with this project, which took me about several weeks to develop, and yeah, for sure, before I started working on this project, I for sure I tried to find similar solutions on YouTube as I searched the entire internet, hoping that I would find an easy way
to analyze my Gmail right to clean but I could not find anything. And when I say anything, I mean I could not find any easy solution. The area only complicated like high software development level complicated. And also outdated instructions, and basically I'm very surprised that from eight billion people, no one had the idea to just just to solve this very very important problem, I think.
So then I said, okay, why not make it myself, and I decided to create this software and to record the video tutorial for it to be super easy to use even for the people without any technical skills. So yeah, the video is very easy to follow. You can find it on a YouTube channel Leo de Bro. Also, you can find it on YouTube just by searching who sent me most mails in Gmail, and that's it. You can. You can find it very easily. And yeah, probably probably
on the entire planet. Probably I am the first person who who tried to solve this problem to who tried to share this solution with very easy instructions to the people, to have ability to give ability to the people even without any software development or technical skills. So that's the main idea. So I think I think millions of people would find this video tutorial very useful for them.
Yeah, I think so, yes, definitely definitely. Uh And by the way, so sorry Peter and Chreas, but I actually just went on to the subject and we even like skipped you guys introduction, but just so that I don't have this pass by in today's episode, we also so you have myself Lucas by an eating case you didn't knew my name before, but also joining me in today's episode along with Levan are they also hosts Chris Ruin,
Hello everybody, and Peter us up Hill. Awesome. So, Levan, you already gave a very detailed explanation of which problem specifically your project solves, and I think what we could direct perhaps the beginning of our episode towards is which big lessons are audience, which is primarily made up of React developers,
can learn from your experience. Right, So basically some of the questions that come to my mind as a as an engineer myself is well and this is just questions right, Like of course, besides the just big kudos to you for taking this initiative of of being like, oh okay, nobody did this, let me do this myself. So first off, thank you for that
and for creating content around that to educate people. That's highly appreciated. And what I would like to understand now is this feeling of I can't find a solution let me build this myself is something that I think all engineers struggle through life. So we are always thinking, even when we actually have a solution, it's sometimes like, it's not exactly what I want to, let me build this myself, you know. So this is a feeling that we generally
have. And in your case, there was really no other solution. So I think there are many there are many things, the many lessons that we can extract from there. So the first thing is I would like to understand, since there wasn't any solution out there, how did you decided which things
would be included in your solution? Like it not only analyzes your of course, it analyzes your mailbox, but through this analysis, it could answer several different questions, right, so you did have to go through a mental process of deciding which questions your code would answer and which questions it would not answer because they would be out of scope. So how did you approach this?
And in general, how much time and effort would you say you had invested in this package to reach the current state in which it is right now. Yeah, so it was the process of about several weeks, maybe maybe four weeks or five weeks, And yeah, the development, the improvement of answering some questions which features or which statistical calculations should I include in this package.
Yeah, these things came day by day during the process. But first, the very first thing I wanted to achieve, that is to just to see the senders which sent me most males, just to have some general idea about who was the most frequent senders. Right, that was the idea. And yeah, I tried many like I experimented with many solutions, and actually this solution is my second solution about I have uploaded my first video about this Gmail
analyzation process. I created another solution before, which was using epscript language Google appscript language, which is based on JavaScript. Probably software engineers find this interesting. So my previous video was about uh hm, analyzing this Gmail using different method, which, as I said, using abscript language, which is integrated in the Gmail and in the Google Sheets platform by by Google. So it
seemed like it was more comfortable, more like easier to use. Right for for users, it was easier to develop because I could just integrate a simple pattern on the Google Sheets Google Sheets document and the user could just click on the pattern to analyze his Gmail info and everything was integrated into everything, and uh functional functional. Functionally, they worked very fine and very well, but problem was speed performance. Before for about like five hundred dollars maybe one thousand
or two thousand mail box, it was good enough. But when some people contacted me and asked me some help about what is going on, I have like one hundred thousand males and this solution doesn't work. It just has time limitations, it has execution speed limitations. So yeah, I discovered that Gmail has so many speed limitations for this eppscript method, this abscript code execution.
So yeah, it functionally it was very good, but because of the speed, it was basically unusable because if you had like if you wanted to underline is ten thousand emails, it would take several hours to analyze it. But with new my new methods, it will take about two minutes. That's the yeah. So yeah, yeah, if you had one hundred thousand males in your Gmail with the abscript method, it would take days, like maybe maybe one week to analyze it. And yeah, it was it was basically unusable
and it was basically not a solution. So yeah, it would probably one year ago on two or two years ago from since then I was trying and I was thinking about what can I improve, How can I improve this? How can I improve this? And then I remember that Google has special website Google Takeout, which is takeout Google com and you can download any data from your gym, from your Google ecosystem, from your Google environment. You can
it may be Gmail or Google Photos or Drive or everything. Right, so yeah, then I discovered that you can download all your Gmail data and it includes just just one file which is n box extension, which has n box extension format and this just this one file includes everything and with the special libraries Male part of libraries and Male Analyzer libraries, you can basically analyze this file
in your own local machine, in your environment. So there will be no uh speed limit from Google service because we are no longer using Google service. We just analyze it in your in your computer with your with the speed, with the power of your CPO. So we have absolutely absolutely total freedom or for the speed of that. That's why instead of days, now it takes minutes and it's yeah, it's like it's it. It now really seems like a solution. So yeah, it felt very good that some finally it worked,
and yeah, for sure. I had to test it in many computers, in many Gmail mail boxes of my friends to make sure that everything was correct and the calculation was correct. I fixed many bugs, many mistakes. And also anyone can see the code. The source code ont did habit its
open source. The software is free and open source, so anyone can come a beauties or make some suggestions, make some improvements, some poor requests, some feedback, and I will be happy if the community just helps me and helps each other to improve this little project, which is kind of little, but I think very we're desirable, a very good thing, and many people
will be very happy to have this information. Because even if you don't, even if you don't want to clean up your emails, sometimes you just you just you're just curious. Let's see how what what is the statistics of my Gmail? Who said? Who is the most frequent center? Who is interested in me the most? For certainly most males? Right? And also I don't remember maybe who where I send most males? And so on? Uh, and yeah, I think I explained some some differences between the old approach,
old method and the new method. That's the idea. And also I'm trying to think about maybe I can improve it, make it more comfortable because right now, yeah, user, the users don't have don't need to have any technical or any software engineering skills to follow this tutorial. But it's it's
still a little little technique, a little techy uh steps. Yeah, it it seems like someone who does these steps, it seems like he is a full blown software development But yeah, maybe maybe I can after maybe in the future I will be able to just make it one patent click. Maybe I will. I will maybe uh edit or develop an on as an ed on for Gmail, like Gmail has some ed ons, right, But the thing is that these edits also work on the appscript environment. That's the idea.
The problem is that ASCRIPT is very slow by Google servers. So yeah, I'm thinking about it. Maybe in the future there will some some new doors open, and yeah, maybe we will have some easier ways to do it. But yeah, for now, I think it's it's good enough and many people already can use it very quickly and very easily. It is, Yeah, it is. It works on a local machine, but it it is
accessible for all major systems, I mean Windows, Mark Linux. It is accessible for all major systems, so there will be no problem about like always support or anything like that, because it's based on note js, which is JavaScript frame of JavaScript environment to brand custom scripts, customer programs. Right. So yeah, I think that's my basic answer for this question. Maybe I forgot some things about it. No, that's fine. And also m box,
which is the format that Gmail uses. It's not only for email, right, it's it's from my understanding, universal format. I remember that. Sorry. I think it's a proprietary format from Gmail and only for Gmail. So that's why it is very problematic to convert the design box format file into Outlook format file because I think they it is very proprietary and very corporative.
I don't know corporative format. So yeah, there's a box. Yeah, basically means it's mail books, but it's the Gmail from the company Gmail,
I think. So I don't think that is the UK is. Actually I'm saying that because I have used emails on a self hosted server very back in the day, and I would in the time of my life, I used to take care of technical infrastructure to a few small businesses here in my city, and I would do them some support in terms of like putting the website online and having their server take care of their emails as well, and those were not Google emails, they were just self hosted emails on on some cheap
cloud, and whenever I needed to export mail box, they would be exported using the m box format. And I actually think this is a very flexible format. I don't think this is specific to Gmail at all, actually, which makes your library very interesting because people could use it to analyze other other mail boxes as well, actually any of it. Yeah, that's what I
was thinking about it right now. Yeah, I called it Gmail, but you now, I think that if if other mail services can export or download file with m box extension, yeah, that would be I think, just very easy to analyze these files too. So yeah, maybe maybe I will
do some experiments about it. Yeah why not? Yeah, I wonder if, like, if you knew about this before, maybe you could have found a particular too analy It's like I'm reading the good news and at the same time the bad news that maybe it did exist that before it was just not under the Gmail prefix. But I think if you just look for m box analysis, you can probably find something that that does this. And I can even see that there are a few libraries on MPM itself for m box specifically,
that's the idea. I basically I use these libraries, but these libraries are not user friendly, I mean user friendly for the non technical users there for software developers, but this specific package I developed is everyone friendly. That's the idea. Gotcha? Gotcha? Okay, okay, that makes sense?
And what next steps for that? Like you do you dedicated a lot of time onto this, So are you going to transform this into perhaps a simple website where people can just upload it and have it being parted without them having to install anything, or are you going to try to maybe monetize this in in a way. So what are your plans for the scope base? Yeah?
For no, I don't know yet, but yeah I have someone also they told me that maybe you could, if you could create a website and do the do it more easier, and maybe it would be Uh maybe I can't do it, but yeah, because it is file analyzation, and maybe browsers have some some you know, excess limitations too far, so probably it will be problematic, but I will think about it and about the monetization. Right now, I'm just actually just included some donation leaks and sometimes people give
me some donations. Very thankful for that. But about the monetization, if I if someone asks me to maybe may why not make it a paid version
or something like that. I don't think so many There are many, you know, software, so many on, so many good things which are used by millions of people, and they are free, and I think it would be better that this software just to be free, my software, and it's it's just I think it's just a good thing for my I don't know, for my career or also I just wanted to, you know, I just wanted to solve a problem. I did not have anything beyond it in my
mind. I just wanted first for me because I wanted to analyze my Gmail. Then my Gmail was huge and I was thinking, how can I shrink it down? And I wanted to find the solution. And I found the solution, and then I thought, okay, why not share it to other people? And I did it, and yeah, I think that's great.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Learning to file access on browsers, the limitations are quite small nowadays, Like there's even an API that allows you to directly access the files in the posts computer, so there should not be any any problems in that regard. You can even like use service workers and have your your or page available offline and you can do the processing on a different thread instead of in the in the main thread. In that way, you're not
going to block the view as the m boxes being parsed. So there's definitely an opportunity there to turn what you created into something even simpler for an end user. Because I haven't tested those other libraries, so I'm just gonna trust your your view that they weren't very friendly. But still we can't really say that it doesn't require technical knowledge, right, Like if you look at the instructions of your package, the first thing is you need to have no jazz
stopped. Most people that I know of don't even know what is a terminal, and the ones that I think they know, they tell me, oh, lucas. So the things that you do is like you you write code, right, And I'm like yeah, and you do that in the terminal right, And I was like, no, I'm not crazy. This isn't an ide, but like that's what people think, whether you think of software
engineers. So I don't think that I don't think my mother would be able to use this, for example, But if we put it in a have you heard of small pdaf dot com is a website that exposes several utilities for PDFs. So it allows you to compress dfs, to merge, added cut, and it even tries to unblock a PDF that has a password. It's pretty cool. So what I thought was like something similar but for mailbox analysis.
You know, if you're if you're inspired, you could even like have a just shooting out ideas here, Like you could have a price model where if the person wants to extract the inbox, then they have so like if they already have the inbox, they can just upload, then you do the analysis. You can do it on the front end, you don't even need
to run it on the on the server. But then you could say, hey, this is the free plan, but if you don't have the inbox and you want me to download this for you and then extract, then you have to pay this fee and then you input your email credentials and then your system can log into their email, download everything, allow them to download this file and also analyze it. I think that would be pretty neat. Actually
I would love to if this do existed, I would use it. Yeah, that's yeah, maybe maybe I will think about it, maybe I can research more about you tend to actually build it. Yeah, for no, for no, my main goal was just to make it work somehow make it possible, right, they make the analyzation possible. So in that moment, I was very familiar with the note jays environment with this command line not Jazz,
right, and so that's why I just build it. And yeah, it seems very technical, very techy, and it it may be still maybe it may still be very like kind of difficult for non technical users. But I tried to make as easy as possible. I tried to how can I say, like simplify as much as I could, like maybe some also some ten year old kids can follow this video of toial. I think so if they, if they want to, and if they have strong desire to do
it. So yeah, it's just because it's just you know, just install this no jazz soft. It's it's as easy as installing Skype or some very very general, any general software. Just install this no Jazz and just open this terminal window and just run just one command type in run just one command. That's it. So no need to, no need to you know, some kind of tricky things and several commands and doing some other things and things. No, just type one command and go. That's it. So probably
for now it's okay. And yeah, the website solution and website improvement seems pretty good idea and I will think about it. Yeah, that's that seems pretty pretty good. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, here chriss, guys are do you have any particular Okay, so yes, I have one, and I think they want to have this as regards of dissolution, right, So do you think there are any other email services available that can actually do this,
because I don't know. I think I know about hate. Hey, I think Haye kind kinds of like group image based on centers, and there's features where you can naturally you know, like you can even block like if you you know, this kind of meal is coming from this specific center, like it's grouped, and just so I don't know, do you know if any in service apart from this that do that, because then I'm also considering from the mind of users, So if someone seins a service that could do
that for that to that then maybe going to the terminal, So maybe some some or maybe I want to use this service. So what do you think did you in your in your in your search, or maybe when you were quitting the package, did you kind of have an idea of any of that in your service? I was this something similar, Yeah, that's what live. So the questions like, are they available some kind of similar services online to do it with special website or service? Right, yeah, yeah,
yeah, for sure. Sure. I tried to search with many keywords in Google, I in read it or anywhere in any social network. I tried to search with many texts, many keys, like how to find or how to start senders, how to find most frequent center and everything. I tried many things to search in the Internet, and there were also other people searching something like that, and there were no answers to their questions how to do it? They asked this question how to do it? And there was no
answer. And yeah, I think I found like one or two paid services which which provided some similar service to analyze your Gmail. But even for paid services, I could not find this specific thing I was looking for, like sort centers by frequency, by mailtown. At least I could not find it. Maybe I did not search it enough, did not search it well enough. Maybe someone can find it. But I searched it for many days, many weeks. Even during the working process, I checked out the internet.
Maybe something changed, maybe some updates, maybe some new things appear on the Internet. But I think there is no such thing, even for paid versions, because I think because probably it is expected right now. I think it's expected because this analyzation requires, if it is online, it requires probably a heavy CPO usage heavy and maybe Gmail and Google and all the services just trying to I don't know, save some sepure power. But if they if they
made it like pre paid series, maybe they would benefit it. But probably they decided not to do it. I don't know why. I just wanted to find the solution for it, and I just did what I could do with my powers. I get one thing that I think is very interesting. And I'm trying to remember the name of this website. It's called I'm going to send here in the comment section, so it's called Goodbye dot host.
And it's a very interesting website because basically it's the website that exposes three migration tools. One to migrate your website, another to migrate your email, another to migrate your database, and the go is to basically move from one host to another. Right, So This is why the website is called Goodbye dot host and they have this email migration tool which is really it's really interesting to your particular use case because this is kind of like related to it. Right.
So it's about you just input the credentials from one email host and then emigrates from that email host to a different email host using the not s MPP is the IMAM protocol. So I think that's technically if any any email that is using IMAM, you could connect to it, download the end box, and then do this anout. I think that could be interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just looking into the website right now. Okay, said goodbye to your current host. Yeah, it seems pretty interesting if it has access
to maybe n box file or maybe maybe the entire system of mails. Yeah, I'll check this out later. Yeah definitely. Chris, how about you anything you'd like to ask before it start rapping up? Yeah? Sure. So. So I come from like I have no back in any of this email stuff. This is the first time even hearing of the mbox format. But as soon as I heard it, I was like, oh no, this sounds like one of those like yeah, okay, it's a defined file
type. But it could have like custom field a bit to Z, so yeah, I would just I guess I have a general question like and you mentioned you you tested it in a lot of inboxes with your friends, Like what were some weird bugs? Like did you I can imagine you ran into like these weird fields like you hadn't seen before? Or how does this how does the inbox format even look and how does the flow like what is the flow of your of your tool? Yeah, the magic comes from the NPN
website. Actually, this this website is I think it's not for regular people. It's only for developers, I think so. So basically the software package is like mine is not is not available on NPM website because they are these are just for some kind of this NPM webstective for developers who to analyze code, who write code, and to to who you know, who use some packages some libraries to write their projects. So I mean I used yeah,
that's yeah. The question your question about how how I analyze this in box file? Right, because this end box file is very complex, very If you open this m box file with maybe text editor or something like, you will see some random some strange things, and yeah, it is strange for me too, I am not familiar with that. I did not analyze this, I did not work on this. I used pro written libraries for it,
which are also available on NPM website. But these libryries are only understandable by software developer developers like me. So I and these libraries were available, but no one decided to make it to make a software for like user end user friendly software. So I did that. I just used these libraries and from these libraries, I created this user friendly software. So basically the software is written. I wrote in JavaScript and NPM is basically the JavaScript consystem,
MPM website, the store, it's the repository of JavaScript libraries. And basically with the JavaScript code and using these libraries, I without very specific and without very expert and understanding of NPM package. These libraries just clified my work. They just provided me special functions to just access, just to read, for example, the list of males, and then I can read in each mail, I can read center receiver CC BCC, also attachments and everything text and
everything. So I am in with the simple JavaScript code. And yeah, the usage was very simple. But for sure the calculations I did and the analyzation and generating these s CSV files. To make it very accessible for everyone, I had to do some a little bit complex programming coding, but yeah, I tried to I tried to make it. I tried to write code
with very clean code practices, with very organized way. So even other developers maybe can Maybe other developers will be able to easily understand my code, my written code, without without huge struggle. Probably I think so. And even if they don't understand, they can ask me questions or maybe in GitHub they can. They can make full requests and suggestions how can I change this code or maybe how can I improve the code or anything like that. So yeah,
it is very open in githab. I have also another project. Maybe also you already know this project. It is the vs code extension block Man, which has already like more than one hundred thousand installs, and I'm very happy about that. And basically what made this extension, this software Blockman good
was the people. The community. Community helped me so much with improvements, uh, with suggestions, even even non software developers, even just end users who didn't understand, who didn't understand the code, they just provided they just told me some feedback. Maybe maybe you could do this maybe you could add some this feature and they provided very good cool ideas and with the help of community. Yeah, this project is not very popular and very successful I think
so. And yeah, after after blockmen, my next project was this project which is Gmail and box stats. And also I have some other ideas about other projects. I'm just I love, you know, working on my solo projects and new ideas. Yeah. Maybe maybe I will do another thing soon, I hope. So h Yeah, for now, this Gmail and books
that software is available on GitHub and anyone can. Yeah, it's important even because it's important to be open source because because of you know, security, and some people may and have some you know, may think that it's it's includes some malware or some badcode, some you know, virus that infect their machine and they can just check the source code and GitHub and they can make sure and they will make sure that everything is fine and even my code not
just virus. But it also does not touch any other content content of your mail books. It just reads only center address, receiver address cc BCC and some other things like time, timestamp, also idea and nothing more. It doesn't read text what was or title or anything like that because I think it's not important at least right now. Maybe if we add some new features, maybe we can have some more access to the content, but right now I
think it's okay. So everyone can check the code and make sure and they will make sure that it is safe and secure. Okay, yeah that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, and again, thank you for creating the school. It's really nice and as you said, it's really nice that it is open source so anyone can benefit from it.
Thank you so much for this. And yeah, yeah, it's just again, I just wanted to reiterate it was really a pleasure to have your own show, and also just explaining to other people like the effort that you put into this and the whole journey. I think this is really interesting for others that are considering creating utility tools and things like that. So it's always nice to hear. And I like to know if there's anything particular that you
like to promote before we wrap up the episode. I don't know, maybe I will also promote basically I promoted this, already promoted this project, but maybe I will promote it again. My vis code extension Blockman developers, please check it out. I think you will like it. It is a visual
help for developers. It helps us too easily understand and you know, perceive and understand code structure more easily because uh, it renders some special rectangle blocks in the code structure in in the in the code and you just have to see with your own eyes. I think for many people it it gets easier to understand code structure because it is very important for software developers too quickly work
on the code file, on the software code. Uh. And if there are no visual helpers, many people find it difficult to understand where the what is the structure of the code. So yeah, please check out vice code extension blockment by Leo Debro We do okay if you if you can send a link to that in our in our particular chat, then I can send this to everyone in the comments section as well. Uh for sure, for sure?
Now, Peter, how about you? All right? Yes? So I have like I just go because on web projects rather web components and educative So yeah, I just wanted to talk about web components and I think it was mainly because of the idea that I think we at nineteen is going to support it. So I just wanted to write a project and web components with
leads. At least I think leads. It's still like a film of double it kind of uses it uses the the Native work Component API, right, so probably in the project as well, I kind of referenced a lot Native work Component features as well, so I think it's something people could check out. Yeah, so I do the link on the chart. Yeah. Also I used to be here. Yeah, okay, the lane and Chris, how about you? Yep? Yeah, I have just a quick fun one.
I noticed today that stack overflow open there because I can't post. I thought I was logging, but the twenty twenty four Developer survey is now live, so I usually because I like reading the results, I usually also participate in the survey. So yeah. I also saw that we recently had the state of ATML survey released. It's made by the same organization that does the
State of Job script, so that was very interesting. If if anyone wants to be on top of that, then definitely go check out State of jobscript. They always do the survey every year and they release the things that everybody knew that were released, but like people, how many people knew those features or or not. Also, today is the day that we get on the
release of Angular eighteen, so that's some interesting things happening. Yeah. Yeah, Actually I think I just did my promos, so that's it, guys, like those are going to be my promos for today, and well I think that was Everyone just sent the links to Levens from in the comment section as well. Thank you so much for sticking up to the end of the episode and I will see you in an extra