Email-based triggers

Hi folks,
I run a vacation rental that I manage with the hostfully management platform. I'd like to turn on the AC an hour before guests arrive. One way of doing this would be to have the platform send out an email to somewhere (zapier?), and have that (somehow) trigger hubitat to turn on the AC. I'm not sure if there's a native connection between zapier and hubitat... IFTTT seems to be better integrated, but I'm not finding any actions listed on IFTTTT that would enable me to turn on and change the temp of my Nest Thermostats. Any thoughts welcome!
Thanks,
Alex

Ok, I created a virtual switch that is activated by IFTTT when an email arrives from hostfully (which will be sent an hour before guest check-in time), and that virtual switch triggers a rule that turns on the AC...

There are other approaches besides IFTTT that you may wish to discover at some time in the future.

One of those approaches is here:

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Another approach is to use Node-RED and the "E-mail In" Node.. it listens to a specified account (Pop or IMAP) and sends the incoming email as a msg... from there you can parse it how ever you like. This is a nice solution because it is provider agnostic. Of course you would need a secondary server (like a Raspberry PI or vm etc) running Node-RED. You'd control your HE devices via the excellent node-red-contrib-hubitat nodes.

Crude Example:

(connect error is because I did not put in my credentials for this example)

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That would rely on the services involved being up and available at the time you want to turn on the AC. Would you be able to export the list of bookings you have and make that available to the HE hub to setup a schedule for turning on the AC? So something like Google Sheets, or something else along those lines?

I was thinking about that... I could look into exporting the schedule, but where would I export it to and in what form, and how would hubitat make use of it?

Yeah, that I don't know, at least in terms of what the hostfully system can do. If it has any sort of export function I would expect CSV or some form of delimited text would be most likely. If so, and you can get easy access to it as a file, then something could be done with it I expect. Really depends, initially on what hostfully can produce, if anything.

I suspect a csv can be exported, but i'm less familiar with how hubitat can deal with that exported data...

A driver can certainly be written to read the file, the thing that would need to be worked through would be making it available to HE. So whether the file can be hosted somewhere that HE can access. Do you have any thoughts on where it could be exported to?

Google Drive maybe?

You could create events in a Google calendar with start and end times based in check in/out and use my Google Calendar Search app to query for those events and perform automations. More details can be found here:

While that is certainly worth considering, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the calendar events into a Google Calendar from the hostfully system, without some intermediary system to interpret an exported file and call the Google API.

Completely agree but the latest posts were about CSV and other exports so intermediary system is already involved. Just throwing this out there as an option.

This search solution could be expanded to query Gmail too as there are API's for that too.

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