The first⁤ thing⁢ I ever automated was paying my bills. Missing ‌a credit‌ card due date meant fees, and ‍my procrastination was costing real ‌money. That was enough ‌motivation to set ⁤up auto-pay.Since then, I’ve⁣ applied the same logic to other ​repetitive tasks that don’t have ⁤financial penalties​ but​ still eat up time-sorting emails, organizing downloads, backing up work ‍files.

Fortunately, I⁢ don’t need to learn code to automate​ these⁣ tasks.A handful of free tools handle the boring⁤ stuff while I focus on something more‍ exciting that warrants active involvement.

⁢ ⁢ ​ ⁢ ⁢ Automate ⁣inbox clean-up
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⁢ ⁣ ‌ n8n automates my Gmail labeling workflow
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⁤ We all have the same stories of⁤ our ⁤Gmail inbox drowning in‌ promotional emails, ⁤newsletters that you ‌forgot you’d subscribed to, and random notifications from services you barely‍ use.

So, I decided to automate Gmail clean-up using n8n, a free, open-source ‍automation tool‍ that I self-host using⁣ Docker. It uses a node-based workflow system where you connect different services and define rules for⁢ how they interact. For my​ Gmail, I imported an official template that automatically labels incoming emails based on their content.

The workflow checks new emails, sends the sender,⁣ subject, and body ‌to‌ an⁣ AI model‍ (I use Google Gemini since it’s free), and ‍applies appropriate ⁤labels. Marketing emails go to a ⁣Marketing label, social notifications to⁤ social, and ‌spam gets flagged. More importantly, these emails lose their Inbox label,⁢ so my primary inbox ⁢only shows what needs ⁤my attention.⁣ The setup⁣ took some ⁣effort, though, as ‌it involved configuring Google OAuth ⁣credentials and connecting the Gemini