Hi all — this one scratches an itch I kept having: the important emails (a client’s brief, a decision, a receipt) were stuck in my inbox, not in the notes where I actually think. So I built the bridge with n8n.
How it works, same rules as my other Gmail templates:
- ✓ Star an email → once a day it becomes a clean Markdown note in your Obsidian vault, via a Google Drive sync folder. No Obsidian plugin, no AI key — it just writes plain
.mdfiles, so it runs 100% free on n8n Cloud - ✓ Each note gets YAML frontmatter (title, from, date, tags) + the body, with a date-prefixed, filesystem-safe filename that drops cleanly into the vault
- ✓ Idempotent by design: the moment a note is written the email is labelled
obsidian-saved, so a re-run or a mid-run crash can never create a duplicate note - ✓ Honest notes on the canvas: it captures the plain-text body (attachments and rich HTML aren’t carried over), and you should run it once on a single starred test email first
What it does: finds every starred email you haven’t saved yet, writes each as a note into the Drive folder your vault syncs from, and marks it done. Point it at an Inbox folder inside your vault and the notes just appear in Obsidian.
Template (free, official library): Save starred Gmail emails as Markdown notes to an Obsidian Google Drive folder | n8n workflow template
Question for the room: for those who run “email → second brain”, do you capture the whole body, or just a link + summary and keep the email as the source of truth?