I'm building an email watchdog scenario that reads unanswered reservation emails from a Google Sheet and fires a Telegram alert if they've been unanswered for more than 12 hours

Questions
1

:bullseye: What is your goal?

Check for unanswered reservation emails from a Google Sheet and then fire a Telegram alert if they’ve been unanswered for more than 12 hours.

:thinking: What is the problem & what have you tried?

the number of hours (in the Telegram message) always reflects a huge number. Maybe the system is calculating in seconds rather than hours: 494682 hours…

:clipboard: Error messages or input/output bundles

The setup:

Scenario 1 stores incoming Gmail emails to Google Sheets, including a Date_Received column
Scenario 3 reads the sheet with a Search Rows module and uses a filter to check if the email is older than 12 hours

What we store in Date_Received — we have tried all of these formats:

formatDate with UTC ISO format stores: 2026-06-07T09:57:40.467+00:00
formatDate with X stores Unix timestamp in seconds e.g. 1749340800
formatDate with x stores Unix timestamp in milliseconds e.g. 1780857589872

The filter condition we are trying:
(now - 1.Date_Received) / 3600000

Operator: Numeric: Greater than or equal to
Value: 12

The problem:
Regardless of which format we store the date in, the result is always approximately 494,682 — which corresponds to ~56 years, indicating Unix epoch (1970) is being used instead of the actual stored value.
Things we have already tried:

dateDifference() — function not found
dateDiff() — function not found
toNumber() — function not found
left() — function not found
parseDate with every possible format string — all return epoch
Storing as Unix timestamp seconds and subtracting — returns epoch
Storing as Unix timestamp milliseconds and subtracting — returns epoch
Using Set Variable module to calculate hours — variable not accessible in filter
All Google Sheets Advanced Settings combinations — no difference

Raw bundle data from Google Sheets module shows:
“1”: “1780857589872”
The value is returned as a quoted string — confirmed text, not a number or date object.
The question:
How do you correctly calculate hours elapsed between a value stored in Google Sheets and now in a Make.com filter condition, when Google Sheets always returns values as quoted strings?
Is there a way to force Make.com to treat the Google Sheets value as a number so arithmetic works? Or is there a completely different approach we are missing?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

4

I have filtered this way:

AddHours( FormatDate(‘sheet_value’ ; YOUR_FORMAT) ; 12)

Datetime operators: Later Than

FormatDate(‘Now’ ; YOUR_FORMAT)

My example:

image
image434×272 14.8 KB

Depending on the format you are receiving, you may need to parse the date.

Another thing, make sure you filter emails that have been responded to as well.

EDIT: In my example: i realized you don’t need to formate the sheet data again if you already did but it wouldn’t hurt

5

You can also make a formula in Sheets to check if the message has been there for 12 hours

it can give you a TRUE/FALSE ad you can filter based on that value

6

Hey there,

if the incoming value is a text string, then you need parseDate() first to change it to a date value. In your case:

{{parseDate(1780857589872; "x")}}

Returns 7 June 2026 21:39. Form there you can apply formatDate to rework it as you wish or use a date time filter to check it.

Or you can change the {{now}} value to unix using formatDate and compare that to whatever is coming from the cell.