Workflow
Daily Inbox Zero Briefing
Automatically summarize unread Gmail messages, identify urgent emails, draft a reply for the top priority, and receive a formatted Slack briefing twice a day.
Tags
Email ManagementInbox ZeroSlack IntegrationGmail Automation
Daily Inbox Zero Email Briefing
This workflow helps you start your day and afternoon without email overwhelm by automatically summarizing your unread Gmail messages twice daily. It fetches your unread emails, distills the most important ones, drafts a reply for your top priority message, and sends you a neat briefing on Slack.
It accomplishes the following:
- Runs automatically at 7:00 AM and 4:00 PM UTC every day.
- Checks if it should run in test mode with sample data or live mode fetching your real unread emails.
- Retrieves up to 30 unread emails from your Gmail Primary inbox.
- Condenses these emails to essential details and uses an AI model to identify urgent emails and create a professional draft reply.
- Sends you a formatted Slack message briefing and saves the draft reply in your Gmail drafts for review.
Prerequisites
| Requirement | Description |
|---|---|
| Gmail Account | Connected and authenticated via the Gmail connector. |
| Slack Workspace | Connected and authenticated via the Slack connector. |
| TEST_MODE Variable | Set to true for testing or false for live operation in your Needle environment. |
| Needle Platform | Access with permission to run scheduled workflows. |
Workflow Steps
| Node | Function |
|---|---|
| Scheduled Trigger | Fires twice daily at 7:00 AM and 4:00 PM UTC to start the workflow automatically. |
| Gatekeeper | Reads the TEST_MODE variable. If true, it skips fetching emails and returns mock briefing data. If false, it proceeds to fetch real emails. |
| Gmail Fetch | Queries your Gmail inbox for up to 30 unread messages from the Primary tab only, ignoring Promotions and Social categories. |
| Email Trimmer | Shortens each email to the sender, subject, and snippet text with character limits to reduce AI processing tokens. |
| Needle AI | Processes trimmed emails using an AI agent to categorize emails as urgent, informational, or noise. |
| Gmail Draft Creator | Saves the AI-generated reply as a draft email in your Gmail account for your review and sending. |
| Slack Messenger | Sends a direct Slack message to a specified user with the briefing summary and notes about the saved draft. |
Output
At the end of the workflow run, you receive the following:
- One professional, short draft reply saved in Gmail drafts addressed to the most urgent sender.
- A detailed Slack message summarizing urgent emails to act on, informational emails to know about, and the number of noisy emails filtered out.
- Peace of mind knowing your inbox has been triaged quickly and efficiently without manual effort.
Important Notes
- You can customize the Slack user email in the Slack node to receive briefings.
- Adjust the scheduled trigger's cron expression to fit your local timezone.
- Start with
TEST_MODEset totruefor safe testing, then switch tofalseto go live. - Draft replies are saved but not sent automatically, giving you full control.
- The workflow caps processing at 20 emails trimmed for efficiency, prioritizing recent unread messages.
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