A polling-based pseudo-trigger for Gmail

[Pierric]

It would help if there was a node for: polling Gmail

My use case:

Poll Gmail every few minutes for new emails (potentially matching a gmail query as in the regular Gmail node), so that an action can be taken on them.

Any resources to support this?

• There is a post on the blog that addresses polling in general, but it has to be inserted/adapted into each workflow.
• There is also an Imap node that can retrieve email on the fly, but:
  • it can’t implement Gmail queries
  • it implies setup overhead for people who have set up Gmail credentials and don’t want to activate Imap.
• My proposal would be a “pseudo-trigger” node for gmail, that implements the message-retrieval logic from the main node, with similar parameters, and an extra “polling interval” parameter. The gmail query would be modified (or created) to include an “after” parameter to retrieve only emails from around the last poll (plus some margin). The logic to remember emails already seen would be inspired from the blog post.

Are you willing to work on this?

Potentially. I’m not a developer but I was thinking this might be an interesting exercise to try and build it – it should be mostly copy/paste and some tinkering – if it’s confirmed to be a valid idea.

[MutedJam]

I like this idea very much @Pierric, thanks for sharing! Also, don’t forget to vote on it yourself (if you still have votes left, of course).

Similar requests have come up before for a bunch of services, so you might also want to consider leaving your vote on related feature requests, for example this more generic approach from @bartv:

New node type: check for new data

Following up on this conversation, it would be great to have a generic node that can check for new records in data when polling sources. Common uses are: Check if a record ID is unique (useful for non-numeric or non-increasing ID’s) Check if a record value is larger than the last one (for auto-increment IDs, timestamps etc) The node could have two outputs: New records (a list of items that are new since the last time this scenario was run) No new data (not something I’d personally need, bu…

Or this one from @Binks:

"Has Anything Changed" Node?

Hello! I think a useful node to have would be one which takes as input information from the current workflow run and compares it to a previous workflow run. Basically an easy way to tell “did something change?” I think n8n would be great to use to get alerts from things online that don’t support alerts on their own, but it turns out knowing whether anything has changed is a big part of that. Even something ‘straightforward’ like sending an alert when an RSS feed includes a given search term …

[Pierric]

Thanks @MutedJam !

I did try to search for related conversations but never found those. It looks like the first one matches what I was after most closely, and also more smartly than my approach! A node that that would filter out anything “already seen” would work generically and painlessly. It also seems that it was almost there, but then faced some issues I would have run into as well. I’ll up-vote that solution, hoping that work on it can be resumed. I think all that is missing in it to address my use case is an option to “ignore all results on first run” so that only emails coming in after activating a workflow will make it through (I’ll comment on that there).

Cheers,
Pierric.