Hello everyone,
I’ve been building automation flows in the new Google Workspace Studio to manage my inbox, but I’ve hit a major logical limitation regarding the “read” status of emails.
The Use Case: I want to automatically archive specific automated reports (e.g., containing a specific ID like “PMD - VF01…”) only after I have read them.
The Problem: 1. The “When I get an email” paradox: This trigger fires instantaneously at the exact millisecond the email arrives. If I use a “Decide” (Gemini) or “Check if” step to evaluate the email’s read status, it will ALWAYS return “False”. A human physically cannot open and read the email before the flow executes. Therefore, we cannot automate post-reading actions using this trigger.
2. The missing “Search Emails” action: To bypass this, the logical workaround is to build a “Nightly Cleaner” flow using the “Schedule” trigger. The idea would be to search the inbox every night for these specific emails using the is:read operator, and then archive them. However, Workspace Studio currently lacks a native “Search emails” action step. We can only perform actions on the specific email that initially triggered the flow.
Feature Requests:
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Please add a “Search emails” action step for Gmail, so we can fetch lists of emails based on standard Gmail search operators and process them on a schedule.
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Alternatively, introduce a new trigger like “When an email is read”, or allow for a “Delay/Wait” step before evaluating conditions.
Has anyone else found a workaround for this? Are there plans to add a “Search emails” step to the roadmap soon?