I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my inbox. It’s where the most important opportunities arrive, but it’s also where my focus goes to die. Earlier this year, I decided to stop fighting the tide and start building a dam.
The result was the AI Email Digest.
The Problem
Every morning, I’d wake up to a wall of text. Promotions, newsletters, server alerts, and the occasional high-priority email from a colleague. Sorting through this manually was taking 30 minutes of my prime creative time every single day.
The Solution
I built a serverless pipeline on Google Cloud that does three things:
- Categorizes: Is this a promotion, a personal note, or a technical alert?
- Summarizes: What is the core message?
- Delivers: Sends me a single, beautiful digest at 8:00 AM every morning.
Architecture
The system is built using:
- Cloud Functions: For event-driven processing.
- Vertex AI (Gemini): For the heavy lifting of categorization and summarization.
- Cloud Pub/Sub: To coordinate the flow between services.
What’s Next?
The project has since evolved into a multi-tenant SaaS version that I’m currently testing with a small group of users. Stay tuned for more updates on that front!
“The goal isn’t just to manage emails, it’s to protect your attention.”