Amtrak2Calendar

Amtrak2Calendar is a Google Add-On that helps you create Google Calendar events from your Amtrak reservation emails.

Amtrak2Calendar will scan your reservation e-mail and extract train information, like departure and arrival time, and create calendar events accordingly on your Google Calendar. This emulates what GMail normally does for airline tickets, dinner reservations, and so on.

How to use

Amtrak2Calendar is not yet available in the G Suite Marketplace - I need some testers first. If you're a frequent Amtrak rider, you can help test it!

Try the current release.

If you're willing to accept the permissions (and they look scary, I know - I'm looking for ways to restrict the permission set, but it may not be possible), then you can click the button to "enable auto-sync."

From then on, Amtrak2Calendar will scan for new Amtrak tickets once per hour, and sync them to your calendar as necessary.

1. Accept all the permissions. When it says This app isn't verified, click Advanced, then Go to Copy of Amtrak2Calendar (unsafe)

   By the way, I know asking people to opt-in to my unverified app isn't a great look. I'm currently Google to verify the OAuth screen, and eventually, I hope to get this into the GSuite Marketplace.

2. You should see the Amtrak2Calendar web UI, showing all the Amtrak reservations found in your GMail account. Scroll down, and enable Auto-sync.

Deployments

http://amtrak2calendar.runningen.net is Amtrak2Calendar's stable version. Users should go here.

http://amtrak2calendar-head.runningen.net is Amtrak2Calendar's dev version. I use it for testing new code on my account. Regular users shouldn't use this.

Anyone is free to view the live, currently-deployed code.

Feedback

If you're brave enough to click past all of the permission warnings, and start using Amtrak2Calendar, I'd love to hear how I can make it more useful. You can:

1. Create an issue on this repository.
2. Send an email to [email protected].

Making your own copy

You can copy the script to run under your own account, instead of the script that I manage. This is a good choice if you're willing to do a tiny amount of extra work, for the guarantee that nobody but you can see your data. This has the following tradeoffs:

• The script will be isolated to a Google project that only you control.
• If I make updates or bug fixes to the project, you won't get them unless you copy the script again.
• I won't be able to see how many people are using this on my main dashboard (doesn't affect you, but interesting for me to know)

Here's how you do it:

1. Go to the Amtrak2Calendar project in Google Scripts
2. Click File -> Make a Copy. You now have your own copy of the script, independent of anything I control (except the banner image on the web UI, but hopefully you don't consider that a security risk, and if you do, you can change the source code to not use it).
3. Click Publish -> Deploy from manifest.
4. Click the little globe icon.
5. Click the link that looks like https://script.google.com/macros/s/random-letters-here/exec. That's the dashboard for your copy of the script.
6. Accept all the permissions. You're granting these permissions to your own account, not to my instance. When it says This app isn't verified, click Advanced, then Go to Copy of Amtrak2Calendar (unsafe)
7. You should see the Amtrak2Calendar web UI, showing all the Amtrak reservations found in your GMail account. Scroll down, and enable Auto-sync.

Manual build

If you'd like to develop this code, use clasp to compile the TypeScript into Google Apps Script, and then deploy it to your own instance of the script.

Explanation of permissions

When you install Amtrak2Calendar, Google is going to ask you to grant permissions. Some of these seem overbroad, but certain API functions Amtrak2Calendar uses require such scopes. Here's an explanation of what it's doing.

Barring some kind of security flaw, Amtrak2Calendar doesn't collect or send your personal information anywhere.

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly - Amtrak2Calendar parses train data from email bodies and attachments, using the Gmail service. Amtrak2Calender needs this to read reservation information from Amtrak emails and attachments.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events - Amtrak2Calendar creates and deletes calendar events for your Amtrak reservations. It also scans for calendars that you own, so that you can select which calendar to use.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/documents - Amtrak2Calendar uses Google Drive's OCR feature to extract information from PDF tickets, such as train arrival times, that isn't present in Amtrak's email bodies. This scope is needed to read back the OCR-ed text content of the train ticket, after using Drive to scan it.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive - Amtrak2Calendar uses Google Drive's OCR feature to extract information from PDF tickets, such as train arrival times, that isn't present in Amtrak's email bodies. PDF tickets are taken from the email attachment, temporarily written to your Google Drive account with the OCR setting enabled, then read back and deleted to get the ticket content as plain text.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email - This lets Amtrak2Calendar view your email address, so that it can add you to the guest list of calendar events it creates.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.scriptapp - Installs a recurring trigger to sync your trains to your calendar automatically.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.external_request - This is used to load the momentjs and moment-timezone libraries necessary to convert dates. These URLs are whitelisted in appsscript.json.