Gmail Triage

The client, a founder juggling a personal inbox and a client-facing work account, was losing an hour a day to email and still missing things that mattered. Invoices buried under newsletters. Client replies buried under receipts. Promotional blasts drowning out every signal worth responding to. The brief was simple to state and hard to execute: make the inbox trustworthy again, without handing us the keys to it forever.

1. 01

   Trust had to come before scale. The founder needed to know, and be able to verify, that nothing important was being touched before they'd allow the triage to run unattended on 30,000 historical messages. No opaque "we archived 12,000 emails last week" black-box behavior.

2. 02

   Two accounts, two definitions of signal. A receipt is context on the personal side; a client invoice is revenue on the work side. Same engine had to behave differently across the two without duplicating logic or maintenance.

3. 03

   Zero ongoing cost was non-negotiable. A recurring SaaS bill for something this personal would be weird. And if the founder ever paused it for a month, it shouldn't quietly rack up charges in the background.

4. 04

   It had to be fire-and-forget. The founder doesn't want to babysit another tool; the triage needed to keep running cleanly for months without a monthly tune-up from us or from them.

We built the triage inside the founder's own Google workspace: their data stayed with them, there was no new vendor to vet, and nothing to host. Every automated decision is written to an audit log the founder can open at any time: which thread, which label, why it was chosen. The system learns the difference between the personal and work definitions of "signal" without either account bleeding into the other. A daily morning digest surfaces the handful of threads that actually need attention: payments due, live client conversations, anything anomalous. A Sunday report highlights the senders the founder never opens, with one-click unsubscribe links. Anything ambiguous routes for a quick glance instead of a silent archive.

The 30,000-message backlog cleared itself quietly over a week in the background; the founder didn't have to sit with it. The inbox is now functionally empty by default; the daily digest is the primary way they scan email. Every triage decision is traceable in the log, and nothing important has been buried since launch. Ongoing cost has held at zero and the system has needed no tuning from us since go-live.