IMAP Legal AI News Digest Workflow (OpenAI + Tavily + Gmail)

Turn your IMAP inbox into an “AI in Law” news digest—automatically

The IMAP Legal AI News Digest Workflow (OpenAI + Tavily + Gmail) scans your mailbox every five hours, detects emails relevant to AI in the legal industry, researches the topics on the web with Tavily, and sends a polished, branded HTML digest via Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: A trigger executes every five hours.
• Fetches unread IMAP emails: Pulls up to 10 unread messages and extracts fields such as subject, sender, date, body, and UID.
• Uses OpenAI for relevance and summarization: Each email is sent to OpenAI to classify whether it’s relevant to AI in legal topics, and to extract a primary topic and summary.
• Deletes processed source emails and keeps only relevant results: The workflow deletes processed emails from IMAP and filters out non-relevant messages.
• Generates a research report with Tavily: If at least one relevant topic exists, the workflow uses OpenAI + Tavily web search to produce a Markdown research report including source URLs.
• Sends a branded HTML digest: Converts the report into branded HTML and delivers it through Gmail to the configured recipient.

Use cases

• Legal ops teams tracking AI policy, tools, and adoption updates from email newsletters.
• SaaS operators monitoring AI-in-law announcements and turning them into weekly internal briefs.
• Automation engineers building an IMAP → AI classification → web research → Gmail digest pipeline in n8n.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/integrations: n8n-nodes-imap (community; self-hosted only), @tavily/n8n-nodes-tavily (community), Gmail, plus workflow logic nodes like if, set, and filter.
• Required credentials: IMAP, OpenAI, Tavily, and Gmail OAuth2.
• Setup includes updating the IMAP mailbox path and setting the digest recipient email.