Problem: Automating Sequential Email Sending from Google Sheets in n8n or Make.com

[ChatGPT_Smarter_Revo]

I have a Google Sheet containing leads with details such as name, email, designation, and company name. I want to set up an automation that selects one row every hour, sends the data to an LLM to generate a well-personalized email based on a system prompt, and then sends the email to the respective person.

The challenge I’m facing is not with processing the data or sending emails—I already know how to do that. My main issue is selecting a single row sequentially every hour without repeating previous rows.

In Make.com and n8n, most triggers work when a new row is added. However, in my case, the data is already present, and I need a mechanism that picks rows one by one in order, ensuring each row is processed only once.

How can I achieve this in n8n or Make.com while keeping it structured, clean, and time-controlled? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

[Olek]

In the spreadsheet, I would add a column “Is processed” and pre-filled it with FALSE.
Then in Google Sheet node that reads the file I would set a filter by this column with value to match equal to expression {{ false }} and added a node option Return only First Matching Row.
Then did my staff.
Then, upon success, I’d update the processed row by setting the “Is processed” field value to {{ true }} (or rather {{ $now }} to know when it was actually processed, for debugging purposes).

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