Missing trigger "email sent"

[devry]

I’m building a reminder system that triggers when a specific keyword is used in an outgoing Outlook email. I noticed n8n doesn’t seem to have a ‘Sent Mail’ trigger like Make does. I really prefer the n8n interface over Make, so I’m trying to find a way to make it work here.

Has anyone found a way to watch the ‘Sent’ folder in Outlook using n8n?

[Orionpax]

@devry n8n doesn’t actually have an ‘on email sent’ trigger yet. One way around it is to just have n8n poll the ‘Sent’ folder every few minutes, you’d just need to keep track of the message IDs so you don’t double-process anything. Or, if you want it to trigger instantly, you could have your colleague CC a dummy Gmail account. That way, the moment the email hits that inbox, the workflow kicks off.

[devry]

Thanks a lot for the reply. Will definitely try this !

[Orionpax]

You are welcome. Kindly mark as the solution if this helps!

[Websensepro]

Hi @devry

You’re right, n8n doesn’t have a native ‘Sent Mail’ trigger yet, but you can easily build a ‘Polling Workflow’ to achieve the exact same result. Here is the best way to structure it:

• Schedule Trigger: Set this to run every 1, 5, or 10 minutes (depending on how ‘real-time’ you need it).

• Microsoft Outlook Node:

  • Resource: Message

  • Operation: Get Many

  • Folder: Select Sent Items from the list.[1]

  • Filters: You can use the ‘Query’ parameter to look for your specific keyword directly in the API call (e.g., contains(subject, ‘keyword’) or contains(body, ‘keyword’)).

• Filter/IF Node: Double-check if the keyword exists in the output.

• Handling Duplicates: To make sure you don’t trigger a reminder for the same email twice, use a Wait Node (with ‘Resume on Message’) or better yet, store the Message ID in a small database (like Baserow, Google Sheets, or n8n’s static data) and check if the ID has already been processed.

It’s a bit more manual than Make, but it gives you much more control over the logic!

If this answer was helpful for you, please mark it as the solution and give it a like!

[devry]

thanks so much for the reply @Websensepro