inbox-triage

A small personal tool that keeps a Gmail inbox clear of promotions and newsletters.

What it does

Once a day it signs in to the account owner's Gmail over IMAP, looks at the sender of each message in the inbox, and sorts senders into five groups: receipts, alerts, newsletters, promotions, and everything else. Newsletters and promotions are labelled and moved out of the inbox (archived). Everything else stays where it is. It never deletes mail and never sends mail.

It writes a short digest of what it archived, so nothing disappears without a record.

Why it asks for Gmail access

Archiving and labelling mail over IMAP requires Google's https://mail.google.com/ scope; it is the only scope Gmail accepts for IMAP sign-in. The tool uses that access only to read message headers, apply labels, and archive.