Send Keyword Hacker News Digests with Algolia + SMTP (n8n)

Get a daily Hacker News keyword digest—automatically—sent by SMTP with duplicate protection

This n8n workflow searches Hacker News via the Algolia API for the keywords you choose, compiles a plain-text digest of new high-scoring stories, and emails it using SMTP. It also remembers which story IDs were already sent so you don’t get repeats on future runs.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily (or manually for testing) to start the digest process.
• Validates and splits your keyword list, building one Hacker News search query per keyword using your configured lookbackHours window.
• Fetches results from the Hacker News Algolia search API for each keyword.
• Merges and filters stories across all keywords, keeping only items that meet your minPoints threshold and removing any story IDs already emailed.
• Formats a plain-text digest of the matching stories.
• Sends the email via SMTP only when there are new matching stories (no “empty” emails).
• Tracks sent items using n8n workflow static data, storing story IDs to prevent duplicates in subsequent executions.

Note: manual test runs don’t save static data, so you may see the same stories again—this is expected.

Use cases

• Monitor specific topics (e.g., “LLM”, “databases”, “devops”) and get a daily email of new Hacker News highlights.
• Give SaaS teams a low-effort way to track emerging discussions relevant to their product roadmap.
• For automation engineers, validate keyword search logic and email delivery behavior in a repeatable n8n workflow.

Technical details

• n8n (tested on 2.41.6)
• Nodes: if, set, code, http request, email send
• Integration: Hacker News via Algolia search API (free; no API key needed)
• Email delivery: SMTP (configure an n8n SMTP Email credential and select it in the email-sending step)

Setup & customization

• Update Config values: keywords, lookbackHours, minPoints, maxPerKeyword, alertTo, and fromEmail.
• Activate the workflow so n8n persists the static “seen” list across executions.