I am trying to come up with a way to have Zapier send Google Calendar notifications via Slack. We’re on the standard plan and the poll rate for “event start” isn’t working well for us so I came up with the following:
Google Calendar Email Alert for 10 minute start time
Gmail filter to take those inbound emails from Google, apply a label in “Calendar Alerts”
Zapier to check for new mail connected to my Gmail account in that label “Calendar Alerts”
Javascript code by Zapier to run and parse/split the data I need
Send to Slack
Doing it all manually works fine and when I am working through the zap steps, everything works with no issues. The problem is it won’t run by itself. The email comes in from Google, gets the label but never triggers the zap. I see nothing in the Zap history. Any ideas?
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I think I just found my issue. Did Zapier recently move standard plan to 15 minutes regardless of the trigger? I thought new email was always instant?
What would be the best way to achieve this using the Standard plan trigger rate of 15 minutes and Google Calendar time sensitive notifications? What would be the best way to stagger it?
Hi @ReturnCo!
Stepping back a minute, can I ask why the Event Start wasn’t working well for you? You can set the Event start trigger to fire a given number of minutes *before* the start, would that do what you need here?
If you add a time in the field I highlighted in the above image, you can tell the Zap to trigger any number of minutes before the actual start time. Would that work for you?
If that’s not quite what you need, there are some cool tools out there that might do what you need. For example, if you have a Mac and want to send the messages to Slack to remind you about meetings, I use Superpowered for that, which is great because it gives you any meeting links (ie zoom) so you can click right into it without needing to find the meeting in your calendar - That’s not an official Zapier recommendation, just something that I personally like! There are other tools that integrate with your calendar (eg Reclaim) and you can also directly link Slack to Google Calendar. Linking Slack to Google Calendar wont give you a notification at the start of a meeting, but it does send you all of your events at the start of the day.
To answer your other question, the New Email gmail trigger isn’t instant so the timing will depend on your plan. You can see the scheduled (polling) trigger times for each plan on the Pricing page. I hope that helps!
