I teach automation for journalism students (without any coding experience) and would really love to use N8N as the starting point. GMAIL is always a really good example case but it’s very tricky to configure with N8N compared to Zapier (How to Get Started with Gmail on Zapier | Gmail | Help & Support | Zapier) and it can be a bit of a turnoff with all these non-sensical configurations (for most people) inside the Google Console. Another example is Twitter (which is hugely popular among journalists) which is also in great need of an update for the new API v2.
Everything else is so much better with N8N, so I’m just hoping for a little more userfriendlyness for unexperienced users.
Hey @systemaddict,
great to hear that you want to use n8n to teach automation. I agree that the gmail setup could be easier, so I changed your post to feature request. Make sure to upvote it yourself.
Are you using the cloud version? I think it’s as simple as logging into your Google account there.
I think the complication comes in that if you self-host n8n you need to configure your own OAuth2 Client ID in GCP.
I know some tools like rclone ship with an “internal” client id/key that can be shared.
From Google drive
When you use rclone with Google drive in its default configuration you are using rclone’s client_id. This is shared between all the rclone users. There is a global rate limit on the number of queries per second that each client_id can do set by Google.
It would be nice if we had a default for any/all OAuth creds, and elect to supply our own in the self-hosted version, however that’s probably quite a management burden for n8n.
UPDATE: I just tried with the cloud version and you still need to get the client ID/Secret from the Google Cloud Console. That is really a big mystery for non-technical people (and the first time you even have to go through additional configuration with the Consent Screen).
Interesting. I will test that. And yes, I’m familiar with these internal/shared ID’s in other automation systems. In MAKE/Integromat this also makes it possible to connect with Twitter without all sorts of pre-configuration (but with strong limits on what you then can do).