SMS Notification from Upcomming Calendar Event

[Levai]

I am wanting a way to send a SMS reminder when a Google Calendar event is starting in 15 minutes.

Things I have tried:
I tried to set a 15min reminder email and parse the information from that into variables to input into twilio to send a text but I was unable to accurately parse all the information from the email everytime.

I have tried doing a search event and have the start time within 15mins but I think I would have to run this every minute so I don’t miss an event.

Does anyone have any solutions on how to recieve a SMS notification when a Google Calendar Event is starting within 15mins. I have searched around but found no luck. Even if there’s a better way to parse the Google Calendar Email Notification, then I can work from there.

Thanks

[Richard_Johannes]

Hey @Levai,

I’m not pointing to a specific “perfect” solution, just thinking out load.
Would you be able to store event information when you create them? I.e. put all events into a Google Sheet. Have one column “starting t-15” which indicates the moment you want to send the SMS. Have a very small script running every minute triggering a webhook in Make.

1. Webhook
2. Get Event Details
3. Send SMS

Best,
Richard

[Levai]

I did think about something like this but I then wondered how can I delete all past events from the google sheet to save it being clogged by 1000’s of events. I also wondered what if the event was edited, would it edit the original one or would the original one be triggered? I didn’t explain this in the original post but this would be used to send to different employees based on who the attendee is. For example if attendee = josh@gmail.com then it would send to 123 456 789 number, but if attendee was harry@gmail.com then it would send the text and calendar info to 321 654 987 number.

It would be awesome if Google Calendar had a way to send webhooks with reminders. Instead of email or notification you could select webhook.

[samliew]

Actually, come to think of it, you can use Google Calendar to schedule Make scenarios!

Did you know you can create email notifications in Google Calendars?

Now all you need to do is to create a “Custom Mailhook” to filter out only those event email reminders to run the rest of your scenario!

1.

Here, I have created a test event with an email reminder 15 minutes before

2.

I received the email in my Gmail account, exactly 15 minutes before the scheduled event

3.

Set up a Custom Mailhook as scenario trigger

4.

Use a filter after the mailhook to filter event email notifications only

For more information about setting up a custom mailhook, see https://www.make.com/en/help/tools/webhooks#custom-mailhook

[Levai]

That’s awesome and it was a thought I had. The only drama is I need to be able to see who the attendees are to filter who gets the notification. I am going to have 1 calendar booking account which I have another make scenario that creates it all and adds the employee as the attendee. If attendee is Johnsmith@gmail.com I need it to send a text to this number XXX XXX XXXX, but if it’s sarahjane@gmail.com I need it to go to YYY YYY YYYY number instead.

The mail solution is perfect but parsing the information sent on the email is the hard part. Since there may be overlaps with appointments at the same time but with different employees. Does that make sense?

[samliew]

Could you put the list of attendees in the description? Then you can map them to wherever you are storing your contacts to get their phone numbers, or put their phone numbers in the description.

[Levai]

That would work yes. I think that went right over my head when I was originally working on this problem.

Putting all the info in the description ie
Name: Tom
Time: 18th Oct 2023 between 10am → 10.30am
Type: Consulting about future work
Description: They are looking to get xyz done.
Attendee: Employee Name

Is there a way to get a calendar id from the email? For example when the email is set I can perform a calendar lookup and parse that information to put it into a text? Or will it work to just parse that information from the email once the email notification has been sent? I will take a look at this within the next couple hours.

[Levai]

I ended up doing what @samliew said about putting the info in the description. I labeled the info ie
Phone: 12345678
Email: email@address.com
Address: 123 Pepper St
And the other fields below.

I then set an email alert at the desired time. I then created a mailhook which gets the email notification forwarded too. I then setup a text parser for each field (wasn’t able to figure out if I can do it in one or not, maybe someone could chime in on it in the future)

And then sent a twilio sms reminder with the information as the output. I added the employees at the attendees so I just listed that in the calendar description to filter who got the text message that way.

[samliew]

@Levai

I then setup a text parser for each field (wasn’t able to figure out if I can do it in one or not, maybe someone could chime in on it in the future)

Yes you should be able to just do it in a single Text Parser module.

Please share your new blueprint and screenshots of input/output bundle of your current Text Parser module in a new thread since this one is solved now.