Send Recurring Emails from Gmail with Foresight

Do you feel overwhelmed with sending the same email to your clients and employees? Recurring emails can be useful in these scenarios.

• Remind yourself a daily habit
• Remind your team to update their payroll information bi-weekly
• Remind your contractors to fill in the timesheet every Friday
• Remind your clients to pay your bi-weekly landscape maintenance service with alternative email template
• Sending monthly report emails with dynamic data

If you are a user of Google Workplace, Gmail does not support recurring emails natively. It can only send or schedule an one-time email. To support recurring email, you have to leverage third party applications or program on your own using Google Apps Script, which can be daunting.

This article demonstrates how you can schedule emails to be sent out automatically at a time and frequency of your choice with Foresight. Foresight is a user-friendly, no-code solution for Google Workspace users that facilitates sending recurring emails with flexible email templates.

Video Demo

The following video demonstrates a use case of sending recurring emails to remind contractors to update their timesheets, on a weekly basis. To demonstrate you the flexibility of Foresight, the workflow is slightly more sophisticated. We automate 2 email templates based on dates. The first email template is used for recurring emails before Aug 10, asking contractors to report timesheets via a Google spreadsheet. After Aug 10, recurring emails will automatically switch to the second template, asking contractors to report timesheets on the new mobile / web app.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Sign in to Foresight
2. Go to Rules
3. Click to create a new rule.
4. In the Select a trigger page, choose the Recurring times trigger.
   
5. In the Edit trigger > Recurring times page,
   1. In the Start time field, select the time when the first recurring email will be sent.
   2. Select the repeat pattern, weekly, bi-weekly, every 10 days or even hourly.
   3. Select the end time of the recurring emails. It can be Never, On a certain date and After a set number of occurrences.
6. Click NEXT
7. In the Select an action page, select the If action. This is optional. If you just need one email template for recurring emails, you can skip this and jump to Step 9.
   
8. In the Edit actions > If page,
   1. Set up 2 branches for 2 email templates, e.g. the old template branch and the new template branch.
   2. In the old template branch, set the condition to Current Datetime date is before Aug 10. Click ADD NEXT ACTION in the branch to add an Email action in step 9 and 10.
   3. Rename the fallback branch to new template and click ADD NEXT ACTION to add another Email action in step 9 and 10. This branch will be taken anyway after Aug 10.
      
9. In the Select an action page, select the Email action.
   
10. In the Edit actions > Email page,
    1. Sign in with Google.
    2. Enter the recipient emails in the To section and bcc yourself if you wish to receive a copy of recurring emails too.
    3. Enter the Subject and the email body.
11. Once you finish, click the REVIEW button and name the rule.
12. Click CREATE.
13. The workflow is like this
    

Notes

• If you just need simple recurring emails, create a rule with the Recurring times trigger and an Email action. On the other hands, you can add more branches & sophisticated conditions in the If action to support more email templates.
• You can also use Foresight to automate sending recurring agenda emails to yourself or your team, learn more in Google Calendar Daily / Weekly Agenda to Your Inbox.