How We Built a Gmail Whitelist Automation at Arihant — From Hours to Under Two Minutes
How a small IT team automated an unglamorous but painful workflow — with Google Apps Script, Playwright, and an AI pair programmer. At Arihant Industrial Corporation Ltd., one of the small daily frictions in our Google Workspace environment used to be whitelist requests. An employee needed a vendor's or customer's email domain added to their personal Gmail Address List so legitimate correspondence stopped getting filtered. The ask was mundane. The process was anything but. A user would email IT with the address. IT would email the user's head of department asking for approval. The HOD would reply with an approval or a question. IT would log in to Google Workspace Admin Console, navigate to Gmail → Manage Address Lists, find the user's list, add the address, save, and reply-all with confirmation. Repeat several times a week across dozens of HODs. Each request took hours of elapsed time and real minutes of IT work. Nothing about it required judgment that IT was unique...