n8n Workflow: Google Sheets → OpenAI Cold Email Drafts

Google Sheets → OpenAI cold email drafts with automatic suppression & cooldown

This n8n workflow reads leads from your Google Sheets, skips emails already suppressed or recently contacted, uses OpenAI to draft compliant short cold emails, and creates Gmail drafts for review—while logging everything back to Google Sheets and your n8n Data Tables.

What this workflow does

• Runs manually or on schedule: It can be triggered manually, or it runs every Monday at 08:00.
• Loads outreach rules and history: It pulls outreach settings and loads your Sent Log from an n8n Data Table.
• Reads leads from Google Sheets: It fetches lead rows from the “Leads” tab and normalizes fields (e.g., trimming text and lowercasing emails).
• Suppression + validation: Any lead whose email appears in the n8n Data Table “Suppression List” is skipped. It also filters out invalid emails, leads without a research note, duplicates within the same run, and any lead drafted within the configured cooldown window.
• Generates subject + email body with OpenAI: For each remaining lead, it sends lead details plus your sender information to OpenAI to produce a subject and body following strict length/content rules.
• Creates Gmail drafts + logs results: It validates the AI output, creates a Gmail draft addressed to the lead, upserts the email and timestamp into the Sent Log Data Table, and appends draft details (including Gmail draft ID) to the “Draft Log” tab.

Use cases

• SaaS teams who maintain a prospect list in Google Sheets and want consistent OpenAI-powered cold outreach.
• Automation engineers building repeatable sequences with suppression lists and cooldown controls to reduce duplicate contact.
• Operators who prefer Gmail drafts for human review before sending.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/integrations: set, code, gmail, limit, data table, sticky note
• Auth credentials: Google Sheets, Gmail, and OpenAI (Chat), using an available OpenAI chat model
• Required Data Tables: “Suppression List” (email) and “Sent Log” (email, lastDraftedAt)