Vishnu KS

[WIP] Saving myself from emails

Problem

My gmail inbox is full of emails that are of no use to me.

They just keep coming every day.

I have spent more than enough time of my life reading these useless emails.

So. It’s time to do something about it.

Solution

Pretty much all the emails with the exception of a few handful are sent to get my attention so that the sender can use it sell me products or services that I don’t need.

I think the only emails that I am interested in getting are these

  1. Emails related to login/otp/ etc.
  2. Emails that are sent from a human addressed specifically to me. Example a friend, recruiter, etc
  3. Emails related to tax, bank transactions, government notices, billing reminders etc.
  4. Emails from other communication services like Slack, Zulip, Linkedin etc when someone messages me.
  5. Emails from GitHub when I have a pull request to review, issue to respond to etc. In general, emails that are meant specifically for me and not sent to a group of people.

I have no interest in recieving the following kind of emails.

  1. Emails from publishing platforms like Medium, Substack, sharing new articles or posts.
  2. Emails from Amazon or any ecommerce with the latest deals.
  3. Emails from Netflix or any streaming providers with the latest movies.

In general any email that is not addressed to me specifically is of no significance to me. These are emails where I am just a cog in the system or data point for their conversion rates.

MVP

Looks like if I can filter out emails that are not sent to me and could be sent to anyone else it would be a great start.

I think I can build a quick MVP by fetching emails from gmail, passing it to LLAMA to decide the relevancy and show only the emails that fit my criteria.

Fetching emails using Python

Setup Python project

First I start with initializing the python virtualenv for the project.

mkdir brutally-honest-inbox
cd brutally-honest-inbox

Install Python package for fetching emails

I found a Python library called simplegmail that I can use to fetch the emails for the MVP.

pip3 install simplegmail

Script for fetching email

Running LLAMA to see if the email is addressed specifically to me

Create a UI which shows emails that are addressed only to me