smart email.
why build this?
email takes up a lot of time, especially for businesses that are already stretched thin. inboxes fill up with booking requests, refund inquiries, spam, and newsletters, and each type needs to be handled differently.
most of it is repetitive though - reading emails, figuring out what category they fall into, drafting replies, checking grammar, and sending. for some businesses this can eat up hours every day.
how does it work?
the app connects to gmail through their api. when emails come in, an ai model (i went with grok flash for speed) reads them, understands what the conversation is about, and drafts a professional reply.
each business sets up a simple config file that describes what they do and how they want to sound - a restaurant is going to need different responses than an online store.
spam and auto-generated stuff like invoices or newsletters get detected and skipped to save on api costs. everything else gets categorized and drafted automatically.
there are two modes depending on how much the business trusts the system: auto-send for hands-off operation, or draft-staging if they want to review things first.
if the service goes down for any reason, it keeps track of which emails have been processed. when it comes back up, it catches up on anything it missed.
the main design decision was to keep everything inside gmail rather than building a separate interface. the whole point is to speed up existing workflows, not create another tool that needs managing.
what's it built with?
- rust + axum — backend api
- postgresql — email tracking and state
- grok api — fast ai inference
- next.js + typescript — dashboard
- docker — deployment
what can it do?
- smart categorization (billing, sales, support, spam)
- context-aware reply drafting
- configurable business profiles
- auto-send or draft-staging modes
- recovery system for downtime
- works within existing gmail workflow
what's next?
- analytics dashboard for email metrics
- integration with booking and crm systems
- marketing to businesses as a time-saving tool
the end goal is to turn hours of email work into minutes, with no management overhead and consistent, professional responses around the clock.