The Sloth Inbox: I Built an AI That Dreads My Inbox So I Don't Have To 🦥
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady What I Built Tomorrow is International Sloth Day , and I have decided the sloths are right about everything. A sloth's whole philosophy is: move slowly, conserve energy, and let the world come to you. My inbox is the opposite of that philosophy. It arrives overnight, all urgency and exclamation points, and…
This story is about a developer who created an AI tool called "The Sloth Inbox" to handle their overflowing email inbox. The developer, inspired by the sloth's philosophy of moving slowly and conserving energy, designed the tool to automatically sort through emails overnight and provide a brief morning summary.
The Sloth Inbox uses a local open-weight AI model to classify incoming emails into categories such as messages that need the user's attention, newsletters, promotions, receipts, social media notifications, and low-priority items. The AI uses keyword scoring, structural signals, and confidence scores to make these categorizations. The developer built this tool using only Python's standard library, without any dependencies or API keys, ensuring complete privacy and cost efficiency.
The result is a simple morning brief consisting of three lines, highlighting only the messages that truly require the user's attention. This way, users can focus on the most important emails while letting less urgent ones "marinate." The open-source nature of the project allows anyone to use it, modify it, or improve it, aligning with the principles of open innovation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
