n8n Gmail Triage: OpenAI Draft Replies + Google Sheets Log

Triaging your Gmail inbox with OpenAI—labels, draft replies, and a Google Sheets audit log (every 10 minutes)

n8n Gmail Triage: OpenAI Draft Replies + Google Sheets Log automatically reviews new inbox emails, uses OpenAI Chat Completions to categorize and prioritize them, applies Gmail labels, and (when appropriate) creates Gmail reply drafts. Every processed message is recorded in Google Sheets so you can track what happened.

What this workflow does

• Runs every 10 minutes and loads configuration values like the Gmail search query, label names, the OpenAI model, and the Google Sheets destination.
• Ensures AI-related Gmail labels exist (optionally creating missing labels used for triage and categorization).
• Fetches a limited batch of untriaged Gmail inbox messages matching your query and cleans the email body (removing HTML and quoted history).
• Sends each email to OpenAI Chat Completions to return structured JSON: category, priority, sentiment, summary, next steps, and an optional reply draft.
• Validates and acts on the AI output: decides whether to apply labels, flag for review, create a Gmail reply draft, and/or trigger an urgent owner alert.
• Non–dry-run mode applies selected labels as a processed lock, creates threaded Gmail draft replies when allowed, and can send urgent alert emails via Gmail when configured.
• Logs results to Google Sheets by appending or updating a row with triage details, draft content, applied labels, and status/error information.

Use cases

• SaaS teams triaging inbound customer emails and drafting responses for fast follow-up.
• Ops or support workflows that need priority scoring, summaries, and sentiment tracking.
• Operators who want a reliable audit trail of email processing in Google Sheets.
• Urgent escalation when certain emails meet your configured criteria.

Technical details

• Built with n8n nodes including gmail, http request, google sheets, if, code, and a sticky note.
• Integrations: Gmail OAuth2 (read/label/draft/send), OpenAI API credentials, and Google Sheets OAuth2.