Using SendGrid's Parse API to Email yourself a Trello card

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November 11, 2012


Nutshell: I used a free SendGrid developer account, a free Trello account, and a free Google App Engine account.

I added a subdomain to iandouglas.com, set its MX record to point to mx.sendgrid.net, then modified a portion of py-trello to be appengine-compatible, and wrote some other Python code to answer a POST operation as a webhook.

SendGrid would perform a POST operation to my webhook when receiving Email to any recipient at @mynewsubdomain.iandouglas.com using the SendGrid Parse API The python script at App Engine then re-POST’s that information to Trello.

The subject line because the title of the card, and the body of the email became the card body at Trello.

Why did I go through this? Two reasons:

  1. Because I could. And because some colleagues would use it. And because I wanted to give a lightning talk at PyCon Canada.
  2. Because I found some crazy service who wanted to charge $10/month for a similar service, and all of this can be done totally free with a little work. Not that I’m against paying money for a valuable service, I’m just opposed to their particular model that costs what seems an awfully large amount of money for the limited usage they allowed.

My code lives here:

https://github.com/iandouglas/email-trello

Please review the README.md file at GitHub for additional information.