IFTTT Gmail to Dropbox – Does It Work If Email Is Archived Manually?

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I have an IFTTT recipe which monitors my Gmail inbox and appends the subject line and body of the email to a file on my Dropbox. The problem is it seems to only check once every 10 – 20 minutes or so. I'd like to be able to archive the emails from my inbox (call it OCD), but then I'm worried that IFTTT won't pick them up. The question essentially is does IFTTT look at:

  • all mail received since the recipe was created?
  • all unread mail since the recipe was created?
  • all unread mail still in the inbox, i.e. the RSS/Atom feed of emails?

I've not been able to turn up any info on this on the IFTTT website so thought I'd ask here in case anyone knows. If not, I'll do some testing and answer myself for the sake of having an answer on the web.

Best Answer

Having done tests on four possible cases, these are the results:

  • Left in inbox unopened - picked up by the trigger
  • Left in inbox opened - picked up
  • Archived unopened - not picked up
  • Archived opened - not picked up

So the relevant factor is whether the email is still in the inbox. You can take a look at it, but not archive it otherwise it won't be picked up next time IFTTT checks for new emails.

Edit

I should probably add that on contacting IFTTT support, the answer I received doesn't agree with the results of my testing.

"Your Gmail Recipes will fire every time a new email arrives in your inbox that matches the Recipes you've set up."

That's not strictly true as we can see, so it's worth testing these things out for yourself.

The trigger check also runs only approximately every 15 minutes, so if you have something time sensitive this can't be relied upon.

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