Gmail Bounced - Update Airtable

Airtable doesn’t have any built in automation triggers that can monitor your Gmail inbox for incoming messages, such as those bounced email messages that show up in your inbox.

However, here are a few different workarounds to monitor your Gmail inbox:

1. Airtable’s automation triggers offer the ability to monitor a special Airtable email address for incoming emails. So you could potentially setup a filter in Gmail to redirect certain messages — such as those bounced messages — to that special email address in Airtable, and then setup your automation in Airtable. (Airtable also offers an automation trigger to monitor Outlook inboxes, so you could do the same with an Outlook email address.)
    
2. Use Make’s Gmail automations along with Make’s Airtable automations to create your own custom automation that monitors your Gmail inbox, then uses Make’s filters & routers to determine what to do with each incoming email.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
    
3. Alternatively, if you’re doing mass marketing email mailings, it’s usually a better idea to use a dedicated email marketing platform like MailGun that will track all of your bounced emails for you. You could still automate & integrate this with Airtable by using Make… for example, Make offers native MailGun integrations (and many other integrations).

Hope this helps!

Ifyou’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hm, and the automation itself doesn’t error out when it bounces, is that right?

If so, what if you tried:

1. Create an Outlook email account
   1. If you’ve got an Airtable Business account you can just skip this step as Airtable provides a ‘When email received’ trigger for Business and above
2. Set up an inbox rule to forward the bounce notifications to the Outlook email account
3. Set up an automation in Airtable that triggers whenever an email is received in that Outlook email account, and its actions will be:
   1. Log the subject / text of that email as a new record
   2. Search for the email record which has the email address which bounced
      1. To get the email address, we’d use formula fields to extract it from the bounce notification’s subject / body.  Could do this with a script as well if you want
   3. Update that record to ‘Bounced’
      1. This would then trigger the other automation you mentioned

Airtable is not supposed to check emails before sending. It uses Gmail API. If google is okay with accepting the to field and has a valid connection, Airtable sends an email out. If it bounces, it happens in recipient’s servers. Neither Gmail nor Airtable is supposed to handle that. Gmail shows you the bounce notifications as it is an inbox. Airtable doesn’t coz it isn’t. 

Also there’s a time delay between sending and email bounce.

The only practical tip here is to find recently bounced notifications, extract the affected email id and mark it as bounced in your Airtable contacts table. Make or N8n or Zapier should suffice for this. Then you can set your automation to ignore any emails that have bounced.

​@Barista Cold Brew:

​@VikasVimal brings up a great point that I didn’t think of.

If you want to verify an email address BEFORE you send an email to that particular email address, you can automate all of this with Make’s advanced integrations & automations.

Here are 3 email validator apps that are natively built into Make, but you can use ANY email validator app that has an API:

• Email List Verify
• Byteplant Email Validator
• emailvalidation

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld