Inbox → Action Queue (without touching real mail)
A take-home recipe that turns a bundled 50-thread sample inbox into a ranked action queue. Read-only pattern, human review required, zero credentials needed.
- Time
- 10 minutes
- Cost
- $0 (recipe runs on a bundled sample inbox)
- Stack
- Bundled sample inboxLocal extraction scriptMarkdown queue file
You’re stuck with
You watched the Gemini-in-Workspace I/O 2026 demo and want to try the inbox-to-queue pattern without granting Gmail scopes or sending a single message.
You end up with
A ranked queue of at most 10 actions, each with owner and deadline, plus a visible drop list so the trust shows up where it usually hides.
The recipe
1. Why this recipe exists
Inbox-AI demos at I/O 2026 looked great in the keynote. Two things they did not show on stage: how many threads got dropped, and what the agent did with threads where the owner was unclear. This recipe ships the drop list. The drops are where the trust lives.
2. Load the bundled sample inbox
The recipe uses a bundled fixture of 50 dummy threads. No Gmail API call, no IMAP, no OAuth. The fixture has the shapes that break extraction: FYI threads, multi-owner threads, threads that look urgent but are not, threads that look stale but are.
3. Extract candidate actions
One pass over the fixture. Per thread, read subject and first message and emit at most one candidate action with one owner and one deadline. Empty owner → drop. Empty deadline + no urgency markers → drop.
4. Rank into a queue
Score by urgency × ownership clarity × external dependency. Surface the top 10. Everything below the line lands in a "below the line" pile so the next pass can re-rank without re-extracting.
5. Human review gate
Nothing executes. The recipe prints a markdown queue so a human marks rows done, drops rows that should not exist, and reassigns owners. Even in a real implementation this stays read-only.
What the artifact looks like
The hero on this page renders a sample queue from the bundled fixture: 10 surfaced actions, 11 dropped for no owner, 9 dropped for FYI-only. Copy the artifact text and paste it into a daily standup doc. That is the whole loop.
Public-safe rails
- No live mailbox. There is no credential path in this recipe.
- Read-only pattern. Even with real mail this recipe never sends, archives, or labels.
- Human review required. The queue is a draft, not an action.
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