YouTube Email Notifier

macOS menubar app that emails you YouTube upload notifications

Installation

Download the .dmg file from the Releases section, and install like a normal app.

Limitations

• If your computer is turned off, YTEM can't send out notifications until you've turned it back on
• YTEM can only send out notifications for a channel's 50 most recent videos. For example, if you quit YTEM and wait 60 days, you would miss 10 uploads from channels that upload daily.

Setup

1. Once you open the app, it'll show up in the menubar. Click on the menubar icon and select Settings. This will open up the settings page in your browser
2. Click the Setup button. Here you'll need to enter two things, and then click Save:
   • API key: This is for fetching channels/videos from the YouTube API. If something is unclear here, look it up or ask in a GitHub issue.
     1. To obtain this, go to Google APIs & Services
     2. Create a Project in the top left here, which you could call whatever you like.
     3. Go to the Credentials tab and click Create Credentials and API key
     4. Now you've got your API key. Optionally, you can restrict the key to only work on the YouTube Data API v3 and only work for requests coming from your IP
   • From email: When you receive emails from YTEM, this will be the email you receive it from. If you own example.com, you could for instance put in noreply@ytem.example.com. If you don't own a domain name, you should be able to just use example.com. This doesn't actually have to be a real email, and you don't need to prove it's yours
3. Whatever your From email is, go to your email app and create a filter that makes sure emails from that email don't end up in the spam filter. We're not doing much to prove our emails are legit, so they will likely get stuck in the spam filter (In fact, I've even noticed Google putting itself in the spam filter sometimes)
4. Click Save and then New email. Enter your actual email, and how often you'd like YTEM to check for new videos
5. Now click Add channel, then
   1. Select the email you'd like to be notified on
   2. Enter the channel URL. Because of YouTube API limitations, this URL needs to either have /channel/ or /user/ in it, other types won't work. If you got a wrong URL, try clicking on a video from the channel, and then go to the channel page from there
   3. Choose the starting time for what videos you'd like to receive email notifications. For example, if you choose 7 days ago, YTEM will notify you about all the videos uploaded since then (maximum the last 50 videos). You'll only be notified for videos uploaded only after the time you set
6. Done

Menubar options

• Settings: Open the settings. This opens the browser to a local webserver at http://localhost:9199
• Check Now: Check for new videos right now. This also resets the refresh intervals.
• Launch on Startup: Click to enable/disable auto launching on startup
• Exit: Not sure what this one does

Dev instructions

Get started

1. Install Node.js (Preferably Node.js 12 because later versions result in larger binaries)
2. Run npm install

Start:

npm run start

Build:

npm run build

Publish new version

1. Update CHANGELOG.md
2. Bump the version number

   npm version --no-git-tag <version>
   

3. Commit and tag in format "v#.#.#"
4. Build the app

   npm run build
   

5. Create GitHub release with release notes