The other day, Miguel de Icaza announced a pair of Swift packages to do email stuff. This, of course, makes me happy. I love email. Email is one of the greatest technologies in existence for the sometimes online computer: it gracefully handles periodic disconnections, so it’s my go-to for thinking about how to deal with Internet connectivity out in the woods.
So now I’m thinking, “Hmm, these libraries are probably nicer to work with than the Kitura/Swift-SMTP library that is getting less than no love from the maintainers. What could I build that uses them?” Once upon a time, I was interested in creating a turn based game server that offered email as one of the transport mechanisms, but I’ve kind of lost the passion there. I mean, I could go back to that, but I just don’t feel it at the moment. Also, my kids are out of school so I am no longer getting frequent updates on their homework and attendance that need automatic parsing and alerting.
So what is my biggest interaction with email? Okay, aside from spam, what is my biggest interaction with email? What is a thing that I already want to do with the email I’m already getting?
Inbox Automation
I’ve been thinking about AI agents, assistants, and what I would or would not like to let a computer handle for me. And here’s a thing: someone sends me an invoice or a receipt. This happens multiple times a day, most days, because I live in a world where everyone wants my email address. I give it to them because the political authorities want to take a cut from every economic transaction that happens, and I need some kind of proof that they already got it.
This leads to accounting. One way or another, there’s a periodic review of the accounts. This is sufficiently complicated that I hire someone to do it. Lots of people do. It’s, you know, kind of important. So, all these invoices and receipts need to get filed and maybe sent off to other people or bundled together for later sending, ultimate destruction, and so on.
Most email clients offer some kind of automation. Filter rules like, “When an email comes in from sender@somewhere then move it to folder ‘somewhere things’.” But what about more complicated stuff, such as, “When an invoice comes in, save the actual invoice file to folder ‘~/invoices’?” At some point, you get beyond the basic rule building capabilities of the mail client and you have to start writing shell scripts or something. Of course, the AI accelerationists want you to install some bullshit LLM agent on your laptop, give it unfettered access to everything, and set it loose, and what could possibly go wrong with that?
But now I’m thinking I might be able to do something really small scope, like: if this email message has an attachment and the message looks like it’s an invoice or a receipt, save the attachment to a particular place and post a notification to me saying that there’s something I really ought to pay attention to. And, if I really do pay attention to it, maybe just delete it from my inbox? Hmm.
This is kind of interesting.
Meanwhile, I need to take five minutes and write a rule to delete all the Kickstarter messages. Five minutes because when I’ve actually backed a project, I want those updates, and because one in every like 100 other KS emails contains something I am actually interested in.