Outlook mail categorized by AI with rules from Airtable

Outlook mail categorized by AI with rules from Airtable

An n8n workflow that sorts the mail of one Outlook folder with an AI agent. The agent reads each unflagged message that has no category, together with category and delete rules kept in Airtable and a contact list from Monday.com. It sets the message's category in Outlook and raises its importance when the message needs action.

What is inside

• workflow.json: the workflow as n8n exports it, twenty-nine nodes: twenty that do the work and nine sticky notes. It holds no credential.
• README.md: these notes.

What we changed from the original copy

• The credential links are gone. Select your own for Outlook, OpenAI, Airtable and Monday.com.
• The author's private ids are placeholders now: <YOUR_OUTLOOK_FOLDER_ID>, <YOUR_AIRTABLE_BASE_ID>, four table ids such as <YOUR_RULES_TABLE_ID>, and <YOUR_MONDAY_BOARD_ID>.
• The model was gpt-4o. OpenAI's deprecations page, read on 12 November 2026, gives 14 January 2027 as the shutdown date of the gpt-4o snapshots and names gpt-6-luna. The agent hands its answer to the output parser through a function call, and OpenAI's page for gpt-6-luna says Chat Completions supports function calling only with reasoning effort set to none. The node now names gpt-5.6-terra.
• The temperature option of 0.2 is gone, because the model page lists no temperature setting.
• Check Mail Schedule Trigger stays off, as before. It now starts Rules, Categories and Delete Rules too, the way the manual trigger does. It used to start only the Outlook read, and Merge waits for all four inputs.
• A stray 1 after a comma in the prompt's example JSON is removed.
• The notes are rewritten, and a setup note is added.
• Nothing else.

Before you start

• An n8n instance, on n8n Cloud or your own server.
• A Microsoft Outlook account and an OpenAI API key.
• An Airtable base with four tables. Contacts needs the columns Email, First Name, Last Name and Type. Rules and Delete Rules hold your own rows. Categories needs Name, Usage, Sender Indicators and Subject Indicators, the fields the agent's prompt refers to.
• A Monday.com account with an API token and a board with a group named topics that lists your contacts. The Airtable step reads the second column as Type and the seventh column as Email, so the board needs that column order.

Set it up

1. In n8n, create a workflow, open its menu and choose Import from File. Pick workflow.json.
2. Add credentials for Microsoft Outlook, OpenAI, Airtable and Monday.com, and select them in the nodes that ask for one.
3. In Microsoft Outlook23, replace <YOUR_OUTLOOK_FOLDER_ID> with the id of the folder to read.
4. In the five Airtable nodes, pick your base and tables, or replace the placeholders.
5. In Get Contacts from Monday.com, replace <YOUR_MONDAY_BOARD_ID>.
6. In AI: Analyse Email, replace the *insert role & title* text in the system message with the role the assistant works for.
7. Click Test workflow and look at the categories and importance in Outlook.
8. When you are happy, turn on Check Mail Schedule Trigger and activate the workflow.

How a run goes

1. The manual trigger starts Microsoft Outlook23. It reads up to ten messages from the folder that are not flagged and have no category. The same trigger starts the three Airtable lookups, which run once each.
2. Convert to Markdown turns each body into text. Email Messages keeps the subject, importance, sender, from address and id, and cleans the body of tags, links, tables and extra spaces.
3. Loop Over Items takes one message at a time, and Contact searches Airtable for the sender's address.
4. Merge waits until the contact, rules, categories and delete rules are all in.
5. AI: Analyse Email gets the message, the contact, the delete rules and the categories. It answers in JSON with an id, subject, category, an optional subcategory and a short analysis, and Structured Output Parser holds it to that shape.
6. Set Category writes the category on the message. If checks whether the subcategory is Action, and then Set Importance sets the importance to High. Both paths go back to the loop.
7. On its own, Update Contacts Schedule Trigger runs once a day by default. Get Contacts from Monday.com reads the board and Save Contacts to Airtable adds or updates a row for each person, matched on Email.

Change the look

• What each category means: the Categories table.
• The rules the agent follows: its system message and the Rules table.
• Which mail is read: the filter, folder and limit in Microsoft Outlook23.
• The model: OpenAI Chat Model.
• How often contacts refresh: Update Contacts Schedule Trigger.

Good to know

• The workflow changes real messages. Run it on a folder with a few mails first.
• The Merge node sits inside the loop. This copy was not run against Outlook, Airtable, Monday.com or OpenAI, so try it with two or three messages and check that each one gets an answer.
• The agent receives the delete rules as text. No node deletes mail.
• The message text, the sender, your contacts and your rules go to OpenAI.
• The JSON holds no credential.