Detect new Sent email via IMAP node

Questions
1

I’m attempting to detect when an email has been sent. To achieve this, I’m monitoring the Sent mailbox in my IMAP node. When I send an email through Thunderbird, the sent message is automatically copied to the Sent folder. However, this action isn’t being detected by the IMAP node.

Interestingly, when I manually copy a message to the Sent folder, the IMAP node is triggered as expected.

This leads me to believe there’s a difference in how these two actions - sending an email and manually copying a message - are perceived by the IMAP node.

Is there a way to ensure that the IMAP node is triggered in both scenarios?

2

Hi @Shalak :wave: Sorry to hear you’re having trouble with this!

Could you confirm what version of n8n you’re using, as well as if you’re on n8n cloud or self-hosting? Could you also share your workflow?

Out of curiosity, do other actions trigger the IMAP node as you’d expect from Thunderbird?

3

I’m self-hosting 0.226.2.

Out of curiosity, do other actions trigger the IMAP node as you’d expect from Thunderbird?

Huh, I believe there’s no other actions apart from monitoring given mailbox :thinking: Or am I missing something?

The workflow is just an IMAP node :slight_smile: To reproduce start listening on it and:

  • move any message to Sent folder, observe detection
  • send an email using any client, observe no detection

I just bumped to 0.231.2, the issue is still there.

1 Like
4

I just noticed another thing - if I move/copy a read message to Sent it also doesn’t trigger. So it appears it only monitors for new unread messages.

5

Hi @Shalak , so after testing further, I’ve had no issues having the node trigger when I send an email from Thunderbird:

image
image1920×989 86.5 KB

But when I created a specific, new folder in Thunderbird, that never triggered the node. I’ve also ensured that Gmail label is IMAP enabled:

image
image2294×502 90.2 KB

Can you confirm if you’re also seeing this with a Gmail based IMAP server, or something else?

6

I am not using Gmail. I use local hosting provider that exposes standard IMAP server.

7

Have you checked on the imap server to see if the data goes in the same place? I have seen some odd things between imap servers and clients over the years.

8

Yep, from UX perspective all messages look the same in the Sent folder (both the ones I sent and the ones I manually moved there)

9

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.