I’m trying to build a goal to force myself to send pictures to my mother’s online photo frame. This is done via email, and a gmail search for “in:sent to:foo@example.com” pulls up those emails. However, Gmail Filters and IFTTT triggers don’t seem to be able to process newly sent emails, only newly received emails.
Has anybody done anything like this or have any ideas?
Excellent plan! (One of my highly successful long-running goals is the one to phone my mother more often. Even after finding out about the underlying Beeminder goal, she’s thrilled with this new, ‘better son’.)
Would [B]CC’ing yourself do the trick? Or email the photos from a sockpuppet Gmail account that cc’s your IFTTT-linked Gmail account.
The native IFTTT way of processing sent emails is to CC them via their ‘email’ channel, either with or without a hashtag.
Dropping pictures into a Dropbox folder and having IFTTT then email them to your mother’s photo frame might give you other options for recording a Beeminder datapoint. (If the resulting recipe creates multiple unwanted datapoints on a single day, we can change the goal to use the max/min datapoint rather than auto-sum the day’s total.)
Ah, the sockpuppet Gmail account is perfect! I can run IFTTT on its inbox (or forward to myself) and it can forward all the mail to the photo frame.
The Dropbox folder won’t work due to implementation details on the photo frame’s side (it generates a pop-up “You’ve got a new picture” for emails but not new Dropbox photos. My mom likes the pop-up; go figure.). 
Ugh…gmail wants me to confirm I have “permission” to forward to the photo frame’s email address. I don’t think I can actually retrieve the code they emailed to it (the photo frame downloads the attached pictures and discards the email body). So back to square one I guess. 
Hmmm maybe I could use IFTTT to forward the email with attachment, but then I would need to email one at a time right?
In parallel I’ve sent a help request to the photo frame people but I’m not optimistic.
Alright, I think I’ve found something that works well enough.
The photo frame people actually emailed me back (kind of surprised) and said they don’t have access to the email for the frame and that only the attachments are saved from the emails. Disappointing but not unreasonable.
I’ve decided to go the IFTTT forwarding route even though it limits me to one photo at a time. If I really have a huge batch to send at once I can just do it manually without the forwarder.
Dropbox, perhaps? Dump photos in a folder, create IFTTT recipe of if-photo-then-send-email. That might let you batch up the photos even if IFTTT is restricted to emailing them one at a time.
Potential side-effect: your mom may like the popup for batches of new photos, but it might be tedious for singles.
Another good idea! You’re on a roll. 