Automate Nextcloud Deck Cards from Email with n8n: A Story of One Overwhelmed Inbox

The Day Lena Hit Her Breaking Point

Lena stared at her inbox, again. She was a project manager at a small remote-first company, and every task, request, and idea seemed to arrive the same way – buried inside long email threads.

Colleagues would send feature requests, bug reports, and meeting follow-ups, all of which were supposed to end up as cards in their Nextcloud Deck board. In reality, many of them stayed right where they landed: in Lena’s inbox, slowly sinking into the depths of “unread” and “starred”.

Her routine looked like this:

• Open email
• Copy the subject into Nextcloud Deck as a card title
• Strip out messy HTML and formatting from the email body
• Paste, clean, adjust, save
• Repeat dozens of times per day

It was slow, repetitive, and fragile. If she got busy, tasks were forgotten. If she missed a day, the backlog exploded. She knew there had to be a smarter way to get emails into Nextcloud Deck as structured cards without doing everything by hand.

That was the day she decided to automate it.

Discovering n8n and a Simple Idea

Lena had heard of n8n before, a powerful workflow automation tool that could connect different apps and services. One evening, while searching for “automate Nextcloud Deck from email”, she stumbled across an n8n workflow template designed for exactly her situation.

The idea was surprisingly simple:

• Let n8n read incoming emails from her mailbox
• Clean up the email content so it was readable
• Automatically create a new card in her chosen Nextcloud Deck board and stack

If it worked, every relevant email could quietly turn into a structured task card. No more copying, no more pasting, no more losing tasks in the inbox abyss.

Planning the Automation: Three Nodes, One Goal

The template she found was built around three main n8n nodes. Lena liked that it was minimal but powerful:

• IMAP Email node to fetch incoming emails
• Function node to strip HTML code and clean up the email body
• HTTP Request node to send the cleaned data as a new card to Nextcloud Deck

On paper it looked straightforward. In practice, this was the turning point for her workflow.

Rising Action: Connecting the Inbox with the IMAP Email Node

Lena started by setting up the first part of the automation: getting n8n to read her emails.

In the IMAP Email node, she configured her email server details so the workflow could securely log in and monitor her inbox. She added:

• Her email credentials
• The mailbox folder she wanted to watch
• Search criteria so only specific emails would be processed, for example, unread emails or those matching a certain filter

She liked that the IMAP node could run regularly and continuously. Once configured, it would quietly fetch new messages on a schedule, handing them off to the next node without her lifting a finger.

The Messy Middle: Cleaning Up HTML with the Function Node

When she first tested the workflow, Lena saw the raw email content flowing through n8n. It was not pretty. HTML tags, line breaks in strange places, escaped quotes – not something she wanted to see pasted into a Nextcloud card.

This was where the Function node came in. The template already contained the logic she needed, and reading through it, she understood its purpose clearly.

The node looped through each incoming email and checked whether the email had HTML content. If it did, the script:

• Replaced <br> tags with newline characters
• Removed all remaining HTML tags
• Stripped unnecessary double quotes

If the email was plain text instead of HTML, the node simply cleaned up line breaks and quotes to keep the content tidy.

// Loop over all incoming emails
for (item of items) {  if (item.json.textHtml) {  // Replace <br> tags with newline, remove HTML tags, and unnecessary characters  item.json.body = item.json.textHtml  .replace(/<br(\s*?\/?)>/g, "\n")  .replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/g, "")  .replace(/\"/g, "");  } else {  // If no HTML, just clean up the plain text  item.json.body = item.json.textPlain  .replace(/\"/g, "")  .replace(/\n/g, "\n")  .replace(/\r/g, "");  }
}

return items;

For Lena, this was the moment where the chaos of email formatting turned into something usable. The “body” field coming out of the Function node was clean, readable text, perfect for a Nextcloud Deck card description.

The Turning Point: Sending Cards to Nextcloud Deck

Now came the crucial step. Emails were being read, content was being cleaned, but nothing had reached Nextcloud Deck yet. The final piece of the puzzle was the HTTP Request node.

Lena configured it to talk directly to her Nextcloud instance:

• She set the request method to POST
• She entered her Nextcloud URL and credentials
• She used the correct API endpoint for creating cards in a specific board and stack:

/index.php/apps/deck/api/v1.0/boards/YOUR-BOARD-ID/stacks/YOUR-STACK-ID/cards

She carefully replaced YOUR-BOARD-ID and YOUR-STACK-ID with the actual IDs from her own Nextcloud Deck setup.

Next, she added the required headers so the request would be accepted properly by Nextcloud:

• OCS-APIRequest: true
• Content-Type: application/json

Finally, she mapped the email data into the JSON body of the request:

• The card title came from the email subject
• The card description came from the cleaned body field produced by the Function node

In one last test run, she watched the workflow execute: IMAP fetched the email, the Function cleaned it, and the HTTP Request fired. A second later, she refreshed her Nextcloud Deck board.

There it was. A brand new card, created from the email she had just sent herself, with a neat title and a clean description.

Resolution: From Inbox Chaos to Automated Clarity

Within a day, Lena had refined her filters and rules. Only specific emails were turned into cards, and they all landed in the correct stack of her chosen board. Her workflow had changed.

Instead of:

• Manually copying email content into Nextcloud Deck
• Cleaning up HTML by hand
• Worrying that tasks would be forgotten in her inbox

She now had:

• An automated n8n workflow reading her mailbox via IMAP
• A Function node that reliably stripped HTML and formatting noise
• An HTTP Request node that turned each relevant email into a structured Nextcloud Deck card

Her board stayed up to date without constant manual effort. Tasks were captured faster, and her team could rely on Nextcloud Deck as the single source of truth for ongoing work.

The best part was that the system was flexible. If she needed to change the board, stack, or filters, she could adjust the template in n8n instead of rewriting everything from scratch.

Why This n8n Template Matters for Your Workflow

If you find yourself in a situation like Lena’s, where email is your primary source of incoming tasks, this n8n workflow template can quietly transform the way you work with Nextcloud Deck.

With a single automation, you can:

• Keep your Nextcloud Deck board automatically updated with new cards
• Convert messy HTML emails into clean, readable task descriptions
• Reduce manual copying and pasting from your inbox
• Ensure important requests do not get lost in email threads

Just remember to replace placeholder values in the HTTP Request node with your actual Nextcloud instance URL, board ID, stack ID, and credentials, and to configure the IMAP node with your own email account details.

Start Your Own Automation Story

You do not need to rebuild this from the ground up. The template Lena used is available and ready to adapt to your setup.

If you are ready to turn your inbox into a reliable task source for Nextcloud Deck, set up this n8n automation and let it handle the repetitive work for you.