Surface unanswered emails from the past week
Author had Devin build a Gmail API assistant that lists unanswered emails from the past week, since Attio lacks that tab; he wrote the auth part himself in Cursor.
- What they did
- The author wanted to recreate Affinity's Unanswered Emails tab using the Gmail API. Devin struggled with authentication, so he wrote that himself in Cursor. Devin then wrote a function for emails from the past week needing a reply, limited to Primary. It read the Gmail API docs in its own browser, built a front end, and deployed it. He then asked it to add Supabase storage and an Ignore action.
- How it went
- It produced a working function, a front end, and a public deployment in one late-night session. It worked at human speed: the Supabase setup ran over an hour, which he says he could do in under 10 minutes.
- Worth knowing
- Devin costs $500 a month and auto-hosts what it deploys. The author saw his Replit bill climb from $20 a month to $20 a week with hosted agent apps.
Try it yourself with Devin
Build me a small script that connects to my Gmail account through the Gmail API and lists every email from the past [number] days that I received but haven't replied to. Show each one with sender, subject, date and a link, and skip newsletters and automated mail. Walk me through the OAuth setup steps, and stop once I can run it and see a correct list; it must be read-only and never send or delete anything.
Source: jamesin.substack.com · Undated
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