Gmail Follow-Up Drafts with Claude in n8n (Auto Email Digest)

Never miss a follow-up again: Auto-build Gmail follow-up drafts with Claude in n8n

This n8n workflow checks your Gmail every weekday morning, finds email threads you haven’t received replies to, generates prioritized follow-up drafts with Anthropic Claude, saves them directly in Gmail, and emails you a digest of the queue.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: Automatically executes every weekday morning.
• Pulls relevant Gmail activity: Fetches your sent messages and the corresponding received messages within a configurable look-back window.
• Detects “awaiting reply” threads: Compares messages by Gmail thread to keep only threads where the newest message is still yours (excluding automated senders via configured keyword rules) and limiting processing to a maximum thread count.
• Applies a silence window: Filters remaining threads to those that have been quiet for between the configured minimum and maximum number of days.
• Generates drafts with Claude: Sends thread context (recipient, subject, and last-sent snippet) to the Anthropic Messages API to produce a prioritized follow-up draft for each thread.
• Saves & summarizes: Writes each draft as a Gmail draft reply in the original thread, then emails you a plain-text digest of queued follow-ups sorted by priority.

Use cases

• SaaS teams following up on trials, demos, or support escalations after no reply for X days.
• Freelancers keeping outbound outreach from going stale by creating draft follow-ups automatically.
• Operators managing high email volume who want a daily, prioritized “to reply” digest.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: set, code, gmail, filter, sticky note, http request.
• Gmail integration: reads sent/received messages, creates draft replies in-thread, and sends the digest email.
• Claude integration: uses an Anthropic API key via environment variable ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to call the Anthropic Messages API.
• Configurable controls: look-back days, min/max silence window, excluded sender keywords, your name, tone, digest recipient, and maximum threads to process.