Inbox: Zero. (with a little help from mini)

Upgrade your Gmail by auto-categorizing emails, using AI (for free!)

Sep 03, 2024

A black and white cartoon-style image with a vintage newspaper feel, depicting a hectic, chaotic old-school mail room. The scene is busy, with exaggerated action, letters flying around, and pneumatic tubes running everywhere. The room is filled with cartoonish workers handling the mail in a frenzy, dressed in typical 1930s-1940s attire. In the background, there's a screen like in a mission control room, displaying a robot head, adding a sci-fi element to the otherwise vintage setting. The overall image has a lively and animated vibe, with a more exaggerated, cartoonish style to capture the chaos.

Hey Prompter Community!

Happy post-Labor Day! I hope you got some well-deserved rest. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s a short week. The bad news is that you probably have a ton of emails.

So that’s why I’m excited to bring you our latest project: Gmail Auto-Sorting.

This week, we will deviate from workflow process automation and focus on something else: leveraging LLMs as a point solution for our emails.

Generally, for automation solutions, there are a few categories:

Workflow Automation
1. Workflows are multi-step guardrail automations. Think of these as a factory line. You’ve developed a process, solidified it, optimized it, and made it more efficient (without applying automation). Now, you’ve implemented some robotic process automation or other methods to have a smooth-running machine.
Point Solutions
1. These are single-point automation solutions. Point solutions are slightly more complex as individuals and focus on optimizing a single step within a process.
Agents / General Automation
1. This is a growing category that will explode over the next few years (contingent on LLMs improving in a few weak areas). These solutions are multi-faced and responsible for automating an area rather than a workflow. They are responsible for making their own decisions on how to complete a process.

So, today, we will look at how to build a point solution that can make your life a little more organized.

If you’re like me, you’ve had the same email address for a while - and it’s full of important emails, payment info, and subjects I’m interested in inside a sea of spam, marketing emails, and more crap. My inbox is a mess.

Let’s fix this.

We’re going to create several labels with descriptions in a web app. Our app will look at our new emails each hour and apply a label based on the contents via an assessment from OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini to organize our inbox.

Application Steps

Create labels and descriptions for what kind of emails should be categorized in each label.
Google cron job triggers each hour
Application cycles through new emails and extracts body text.
The body text is sent to OpenAI along with a list of labels.
OpenAI returns the best-matched label
Label is applied to email.
If there is no match, the label is not applied.

App Demo:

Tech Stack:

Google Cloud Run
Gmail API
Google Cloud Scheduler
Flask / Python
OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini

Technical Workflow:

Sounds good? Let’s get to work. Click the button below to start building. PrompterGPT will walk you through the project and help you troubleshoot, customize, or edit its scope. Just ask away!

Important note: To build this app we use Gmail’s historyID - meaning that the first time you run this application, no new emails will be processed, as it grabs the first ID as an anchor.

Build Project

Happy building, and see you next time.

— Nishad from Prompter

P.S. This project doesn’t interest you? Check out last week’s project on building a Reddit bot that finds your product’s target audience!

P.P.S for more daily thoughts on AI, and sneak peak of projects before they’re sent, make sure to follow us on X!

Prompter