how to Detect Marketing and Role based emails programmatically? - spring-boot

Question

I have requirements where I would have to distinguish emails whether it is regular email, Marketing email, or Role based email.
Marketing Emails: Emails that correspond to a marketing campaign. Typically sent to a batch of users and composed with tools like
MailChimp, etc...
Role-Based Emails: Emails addresses that are not associated with a particular person, but rather with a company, department, position, or
group of recipients (ex: noreply#, marketing#, support#, etc).
Can I identify this by email header information? Or is there any other way to achieve this?
Technology using:
Gmail API: to get email information
Spring boot: to process emails

Answer 1

By using the Gmail API you can retrieve the emails by using the following request:
GET https://gmail.googleapis.com/gmail/v1/users/{userId}/messages/{id}
Which will end up returning the body of a Message with the following similar structure:
{
"id": ID,
"threadId": THREAD_ID,
"labelIds": [
"CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS",
"UNREAD",
"INBOX"
],
"payload": {
"headers": [{
"name": "Reply-To",
"value": "NAME \u003cnewsletter#email.com\u003e"
},
{
"name": "Subject",
"value": "Week 9 Newsletter"
},
{
"name": "From",
"value": "NAME \u003csupport#email.com\u003e"
},
"body": {
"size": SIZE,
"data": ""
}
},
}
So depending on how you want to process these afterwards, you can use some of the following fields from the returned email:
labelIds - this field will contain all the labels attached to the incoming email which means that (depending on the settings you have for your inbox) you can easily check this email for instance as being a promotional email because of the CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS label attached to it;
Reply-To header - you can retrieve the email address here and later analyze it;
Subject header - assuming you have a list of keywords set up, you can search the subject of the email and later mark it based on the results;
From header - you can retrieve this email address here and again, based on a list of keywords, you can decided of which type this email is.
Reference
Gmail API Message Resource.