Classify past emails as wanted or unwanted and save to Airtable

Are you tired of the never-ending email management struggle? Spending precious time manually sorting through emails within a specified timeframe, only to get overwhelmed by the constant influx of messages?

This automation effortlessly identifies and classifies emails as per your criteria, sparing you the hassle of tedious categorization. No more valuable minutes wasted on the sorting process.

Whether it's the essential business correspondence you're after or the relentless barrage of spam you'd rather avoid, this automation delivers precision. Moreover, it seamlessly archives the results into an Airtable, ensuring an orderly and easily accessible email repository. 

Let’s set it up!

Step 1: Create an Airtable

The first step is to create an Airtable with the email information you want to save.

Bardeen will extract information from your emails like subject line, sender, date, link to email, labels and pair them with the information from your classifier, once your setup is complete.

Step 2: Install the extension and map the information to Airtable

You will be redirected to install the browser extension when you run it for the first time. Bardeen will also prompt you to integrate Airtable.

Click the “Pin it” button at the top of this page to get this automation saved to your Playbooks.

Activate Bardeen (or hit Option + B on Mac or ALT + B on PC on your keyboard) and click on the playbook card. The setup flow will start.

Bardeen will then prompt you to modify your email classifier. You can choose an existing one or create a new classifier with criteria for your emails. 

After you click “customize classifier”, Bardeen’s classifier configuration will launch. You will be asked questions about the emails you want to keep. Answer in as much detail as possible. This will ensure that the classifier is more accurate.

After you answer your questions, Bardeen will request that you create your categories. Your emails will be classified based on your categories and descriptions here. For example, I entered “Emails with Invoice” as a category and added a description. Emails that fit that description will be categorized as “Emails with Invoice” and any other emails will be categorized as “unwanted”.

Finally, we recommend that you train your classifier with sample emails to increase accuracy of the results. 

After your classifier setup is complete and you choose your Airtable, Bardeen will ask you to map your fields to Airtable.

The left side consists of all the fields Bardeen will scrape for you. On the right side, specify the fields in Airtable that you want to associate with the information on the left. If you don’t want a piece of information, leave that field empty, and it will be skipped. That’s it!

Click on “Save Input” and checkmark Airtable. You can edit Inputs later by hovering over the playbook. 

Step 3: Run the playbook to classify past emails and save to Airtable

Press Option + B on Mac or ALT + B on PC on your keyboard to launch Bardeen. Click on the playbook card and run the playbook to classify your emails from a timeframe. It will go over every email for the timeframe, categorize them based on your classifier and save the results and classification to an Airtable.

You can also edit the playbook and add your next action to further customize the automation.

Find more Gmail and Airtable integrations.

You can also find more about how to increase your personal productivity.