Is there a way to get the specific email address f

Question

In Google App Scripts to process a list of email messages in my inbox. From the messages I need to get the from and to addresses of each message. When I use the message.getFrom() method to get the from address it returns something like this: "FirstName LastName ". But, what I want is the plain email address: "[e-mail]" I can't find a method on the GmailApp object, or the Message object, that would return just this information.

getFrom() returns a simple string, not an address object that can be dissected further. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

getFrom() method should return the sender of the message in the format Some Person <[e-mail]>. If you need just the email address portion of the string, you can extract it using regular expression like this (adapted example from getFrom() method description):

var thread = GmailApp.getInboxThreads(0,1)[0]; // get first thread in inbox
var message = thread.getMessages()[0]; // get first message
Logger.log(message.getFrom().replace(/^.+<([^>]+)>$/, "$1"));

That regex replace the string returned by getFrom() method with the part of the string in angle brackets (the sender's email address).

Answer 2

After you get the GmailMessage object, you can get the email address by first getting the RFC Header named "From" using GmailMessage.getHeader("From"), and then apply a certain Regular Expression to it.

Like this:

 // Get email from RFC Header "From"
 var rfcHeaderFrom = message.getHeader("From");
 var rfcHeaderFromMailRegex = /[^< ]+(?=>)/g;

 var mailSender = rfcHeaderFrom.match(rfcHeaderFromMailRegex)[0];

That will return an email address like: "[e-mail]"