Best Way to Save Gmail Emails as PDF + Reply from FileMaker?

Questions
1

I’m brainstorming a bit here and wanted to throw this out to the community.

I’ve built a script that makes a Gmail API call—it grabs an email by ID, and inserts the subject and body as a note in our FileMaker database. So far that part works great.

Now I’m thinking about taking it further:

  • I’d like to save the email contents as a PDF, maybe using a nice print layout in FileMaker.
  • Then I’d like to reply to the email, ideally using FileMaker’s native Send Mail script step or something similar.
  • The goal is to store the original email first, then reply from FileMaker and maintain the thread if possible.

My question is—is there a better way to integrate Gmail with FileMaker for this kind of workflow? Has anyone done something like this? Or is there a smarter approach I haven’t thought of?

Any ideas or experiences would be really appreciated!

2

Stupid question: Why not leave all the work to Gmail and view in a web viewer?

3

Good point... The company thinks it would be cool not to have employees go through the gmail website.
They imagine getting an email from a customer, then saving that email and our response. Then send a slack message to an employee for them to response, while never really leaving filemaker & slack

4

There are email plugins that take the pain out of this. I'd go straight there. Divide the cost of the plugin by your hourly wage to discover the time it will take to break even on ROI :smile:

5

hahaha! Great, thank you!

6

MBS for the win!

MBS("WebView.RenderPDF"; "WebViewer"; "FM.PDF")