n8n RSS to Branded Newsletter: OpenAI + Canva + Gmail

Turn any RSS feed into a branded OpenAI-powered newsletter—automatically sent via Gmail

This n8n workflow watches your chosen RSS feed for new articles, uses OpenAI to draft a newsletter-ready blurb, generates branded email visuals in Canva/Canvora, and delivers a formatted HTML newsletter to your recipient through Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Monitors an RSS feed on your configured polling schedule.
• Processes each new item by sending the article title and content to OpenAI to produce a section with a headline and two paragraphs.
• Formats the email content by extracting the first line as the email subject/headline and keeping the remaining text as the newsletter body.
• Generates branded visuals using Canva/Canvora (email header and hero), then waits by polling until generation completes or times out.
• Builds and sends the final HTML email embedding the generated header image and the written newsletter text.
• Stops or fails safely if Canvora generation does not succeed within the timeout.

Use cases

• Product and SaaS operators who want an automated branded newsletter from blogs, changelogs, or news feeds.
• Automation engineers building a repeatable pipeline for RSS → AI writing → branded email → Gmail.
• Teams that publish regularly and want consistent formatting, imagery, and subject/headline generation without manual effort.

Technical details

• n8n trigger: RSS feed with configurable polling time.
• OpenAI: generates newsletter headline + two-paragraph content.
• Canva/Canvora: creates branded email header/hero; configured via HTTP Header Auth (e.g., header name X-API-Key).
• Gmail: sends the generated HTML email to configured recipient(s).
• Workflow control uses nodes such as if, wait, code, and no op (plus a sticky note for clarity).

Setup is straightforward: update the RSS URL, add OpenAI credentials, create a Canvora API key with HTTP header auth, and connect Gmail to the target recipient address.