Email Intelligence

AI-powered email monitoring that reads your Gmail, understands every email through LLM reasoning, and outputs a clean spreadsheet of who emailed you, what they need, and what you should do — so you never have to dig through your inbox again.

Read-only. Never sends, replies, or modifies anything.

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The Problem

You get 100+ emails a day. Newsletters, client requests, vendor notifications, escalations, auto-replies — all mixed together. You spend the first hour of every morning just triaging. Half the emails don't need you. The ones that do get buried.

The Solution

Email Intelligence connects to your Gmail via IMAP, reads every email, and uses Claude AI to produce a 4-column spreadsheet:

From	Subject	Tasks	SuggestedAction
Sarah Chen	Urgent — Q3 Enterprise Renewal	Client needs revised proposal with 15% volume discount and 99.9% SLA by Friday. 1. Prepare revised enterprise renewal proposal (Due: Friday) 2. Include Q1 usage analytics for board deck (Due: Friday)
AWS	Action required — account past due	AWS billing notification — payment failed on card ending 1440. 1. Resolve past-due payment (Due: ASAP)
Databricks Team	How to build ETL pipelines fast	Databricks marketing newsletter promoting O'Reilly guide on ETL pipelines. No action needed.
Manager	Prepare TechCorp status deck	Internal request to prepare status update for TechCorp account review. 1. Build TechCorp status deck with pipeline numbers (Due: Tomorrow) 2. Draft response to TechCorp VP (Due: Tomorrow)	ppt, email-draft

Open the spreadsheet. Scan it. Know exactly what every email is about and what to do. Never open the email.

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How It Works

Gmail (IMAP) → Every email fetched → Claude AI analyzes each one → Clean CSV/Excel output

1. Connects to Gmail via IMAP (app password, no OAuth complexity)
2. Fetches every email — no lookback limit, processes historical emails too
3. Claude Haiku reads each email and reasons step-by-step:
   • Who sent this? Client? Vendor? Newsletter? Auto-reply?
   • What's the business impact? Does the account manager need to act?
   • What specifically needs to be done? By when?
4. Writes one row per email to ~/Documents/email-tasks.csv
5. Runs automatically every 10 minutes

Smart Priority Reasoning

The AI doesn't just flag everything as important. It thinks about each email:

What it sees	Priority	Tasks output
Client escalation, SLA breach	Critical	Full context + detailed numbered actions
Direct client request, proposal needed	High	Full context + actions with due dates
Vendor notification needing review	Medium	Context + actions
Newsletter, auto-reply, verification code	Low	One sentence: "No action needed."

External vs Internal

• External emails (clients, vendors, partners): Extract tasks only. Never suggest drafts — clients don't want AI-generated responses
• Internal emails (colleagues, managers): Extract tasks + suggest what deliverable is needed (email-draft, PPT, proposal, spreadsheet, etc.)

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Quick Start

1. Enable IMAP in Gmail

Gmail Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP → Enable IMAP

2. Create a Gmail App Password

1. Enable 2-Step Verification at https://myaccount.google.com/security
2. Go to https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords
3. Create an app password (16 characters)

3. Install

cp -r email-task-extractor email-briefing ~/.openclaw/hooks/
cp -r gmail-intel ~/.openclaw/skills/

4. Add credentials

Add to ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

{
  "hooks": {
    "internal": {
      "entries": {
        "email-task-extractor": {
          "enabled": true,
          "env": {
            "GMAIL_ACCOUNT": "your@gmail.com",
            "GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD": "xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx",
            "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "sk-ant-..."
          }
        },
        "email-briefing": {
          "enabled": true,
          "env": { "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "sk-ant-..." }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

5. Configure preferences

Copy the example config:

cp email-intelligence.example.json ~/.openclaw/email-intelligence.json

Edit ~/.openclaw/email-intelligence.json:

{
  "csv": { "includeInternal": true, "includeExternal": true },
  "notify": {
    "enabled": true,
    "categories": ["External"],
    "skipTypes": ["newsletter", "auto-reply", "calendar-invite", "information-sharing"]
  },
  "internalDomains": ["yourcompany.com"]
}

6. Enable and restart

openclaw hooks enable email-task-extractor email-briefing
openclaw gateway restart

Emails start processing automatically every 10 minutes. Output: ~/Documents/email-tasks.csv

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Architecture

• IMAP polling — no Gmail API, no OAuth, no GCP. Just IMAP + app password
• Claude Haiku — fast, cheap, accurate enough for email classification
• CSV output — open in Excel, Google Sheets, or any tool. No proprietary format
• UID tracking — processes emails incrementally, never re-processes the same email
• 10 per batch — rate-limited to avoid API throttling, with automatic retry on 429
• Read-only — enforced in both the LLM prompt and code. Even if the AI hallucinates a send action, the code blocks it

Guardrails

• The system prompt explicitly prohibits sending, replying, forwarding, or modifying emails
• External emails: suggestedAction is forcefully cleared in code regardless of LLM output
• Email body capped at 50KB before sending to AI
• App passwords (not full account credentials)
• No email bodies stored — only AI-generated summaries in the CSV

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Tech Stack

TypeScript, Node.js, IMAP over TLS, Claude Haiku API, Vitest for tests. Zero external databases or cloud dependencies.

License

MIT