The “Unautomatable” Email I Finally Automated

Originally published

I thought this part of my newsletter was unautomatable: “Reply with template and I’ll send it.”

Turns out Zapier can watch Gmail for that exact reply and send back my template in the same thread—no waiting for me to check email on nights or weekends.

In this video I walk through my New email matching search trigger, the exact search I used, how I exclude myself, and why I prefer as few links in the chain as possible over more brittle stacks. Try it once and you’ll never manually fulfill those requests again.

Want the template mentioned? Head over to casabona.org/youtube – http://casabona.org/youtube and join the mailing list!

Chapters

00:00 Why this was “unautomatable” (until now)

01:27 The subject + “template” rule that powers it

02:13 The Gmail trigger I used (and why)

03:44 Testing + excluding myself to prevent loops

04:42 Reply-in-thread email body (keep it personal)

06:06 Publish + why I didn’t route through my ESP