Email Capture

Email Capture keeps the record of e-mail between sellers and customers. Google Workspace copies every external e-mail sent or received by a member of the group sales-crm@snackprompt.com to the capture mailbox non-reply@snackprompt.com. This workflow reads those copies, finds the seller and the customer in the systems, and hands each e-mail to Communication — Record Email, which writes one Message in Communication and one Interaction per thread in the CRM. It then marks the e-mail in Gmail with a status label. It never creates a person and never deletes mail.

The workflow is active since 2026-11-06. Before activating keeps the setup checklist and what is still pending. It replaces the older Email Logging workflow, which needed one Gmail credential per seller.

The Communication maintainer owns the capture mailbox and the Message records; the CRM maintainer owns the Interactions and the follow-up rules; the Tooling and Access maintainer owns the Tool Account of each seller.

Flow

Generated from the n8n version in the box above: every box is a node and every arrow is a connection in n8n. Pink pills are triggers, yellow hexagons are If and Switch nodes with their outputs on the arrows, blue cylinders read (Airtable, Data Table, HTTP GET), green cylinders write, purple boxes call another workflow, and dashed arrows are error outputs.

flowchart TD
  subgraph g0["Read the capture mailbox"]
    n1(["Gmail Trigger"]):::trigger
    n0["Config"]:::logic
    n6["List Labels"]:::logic
    n7["Normalize"]:::logic
  end
  subgraph g1["Resolve and record"]
    n9["Resolve CRM Context<br/><small>CRM — Resolve Context</small>"]:::subflow
    n2{{"Known Person?"}}:::decision
    n8["Record Email<br/><small>Communication — Record Email</small>"]:::subflow
  end
  subgraph g2["Status labels"]
    n5["Label Registered"]:::logic
    n4["Label No Match"]:::logic
    n3["Label Error"]:::logic
  end
  n1 --> n0
  n0 --> n6
  n6 --> n7
  n7 --> n9
  n9 --> n2
  n2 -->|true| n8
  n2 -->|false| n4
  n8 --> n5
  n8 -.->|error| n3
  classDef trigger fill:#fde7f3,stroke:#d6409f,color:#111
  classDef decision fill:#fff7e0,stroke:#c99a00,color:#111
  classDef read fill:#e8f1ff,stroke:#3b82f6,color:#111
  classDef write fill:#e7f8ee,stroke:#16a34a,color:#111
  classDef subflow fill:#f3e8ff,stroke:#9333ea,color:#111
  classDef wait fill:#f1f1f1,stroke:#888,color:#111
  classDef logic fill:#ffffff,stroke:#999,color:#111

Systems it touches

This workflow reads and writes no Airtable table itself. It reads Gmail and calls two sub-workflows that do the Airtable work.

How the copies reach the mailbox

Two routing rules in the Google Workspace Admin Console copy mail for the members of sales-crm@: one for outbound mail, delivered to non-reply+crm-out@, and one for inbound mail, delivered to non-reply+crm-in@. The copy carries three headers: X-capture-source: external-contacts, X-capture-direction (outbound or inbound) and, on inbound copies, X-Gm-Original-To with the seller’s address. The customer’s copy carries none of them. Gmail filters in the capture mailbox label the copies CRM/CRM - Outbound and CRM/CRM - Inbound and skip the inbox. Mail between internal domains is not copied.

Trigger and configuration

The Gmail Trigger polls the capture mailbox every minute with the search deliveredto:non-reply+crm-out@snackprompt.com OR deliveredto:non-reply+crm-in@snackprompt.com (the same addresses the Gmail filters use), read and unread, and returns full messages with headers. Each new copy is one item.

Config sets five values that the later nodes read: mailbox (the capture address), internalDomains (comma-separated company domains), and the names of the three status labels: labelRegistered, labelNoMatch and labelError.

List Labels reads the label list of the mailbox once per run, so Normalize can turn the label names into the ids the Label nodes need.

What Normalize keeps

When every copy of a poll is dropped, the run ends at Normalize.

Resolve and record

Resolve CRM Context calls CRM — Resolve Context once per e-mail with the seller address, the counterparty address and name. It returns the seller’s Membership and company, the person, the person’s company and the open Deal, plus notes.

Known Person? sends the e-mail on only when a person was found in the CRM People mirror. Record Email then calls Communication — Record Email with the normalized e-mail and the context. That sub-workflow writes the Message and the Interaction and carries the tag email-log-n8n.

Status labels

The Label nodes add the label to the copy in the capture mailbox. When a label name in Config does not exist in Gmail, the Label node has no id to add and continues without error. No node removes labels, marks mail as read or deletes mail: the Interaction’s Evidence URL points to the thread in this mailbox.

Nodes

The workflow has 11 nodes: 10 that run and one sticky note. For an If node, output 0 is true and output 1 is false. Record Email has a second output for errors.

Connections

Settings and error handling

Before activating

Known gaps

These come from the node configuration and the Google setup.

Recover a partial write

Keep this page in sync

The box at the top shows the n8n version this page describes. Open the workflow in n8n: when its last save is newer than the date in the box, this page is out of date until the next review. Every node and every connection of that version is in Nodes and Connections.