Why does the inbox eat the first hour?
Most of what lands in Gmail overnight doesn’t need you, and the part that does is scattered through the rest, so the morning goes to opening forty-odd messages to find the ten that matter. Gmail’s tabs help a bit. They sort by what Google guesses a message is, which is a different question from the one you care about: is this a customer, is this the vendor who’s been hinting at a price increase since June, is this a receipt your accountant will ask about in April.
Filters are the usual fix. They hold up for about a month (filters are good at sender addresses and hopeless at intent), and then your biggest customer writes in from a personal Gmail account and lands in a folder nobody opens.
The 07:30 run
At 07:30 on weekdays dassi opens Gmail in the browser you already use, signed in as you, and reads what’s unread since yesterday. It sorts by the rules you wrote in plain English. Newsletters and receipts get labeled and archived. The receipts also become rows in your expenses sheet, each with a link back to the email, which sounds minor until the first time you need to find one in a hurry.
Replies you send constantly, like order status or “Thursday works,” get drafted in the shape of the examples you gave it and left in Drafts. Everything else goes into a digest with one line per thread on why it needs you.
A refund request above your limit goes to the top of the digest with no draft, since you set $200 as the most it drafts a refund reply for. A vendor you’ve paid for two years asking to change bank details, from a domain their invoices never came from, gets flagged and left alone. Could be fraud. Could be a vendor who switched banks and set up their email badly. dassi can’t tell which from the inbox and neither can you, so that one ends with you picking up the phone.
If you’re on Outlook, the setup is the same. dassi reads what’s on screen instead of calling an API, so folders and categories stand in for labels and your rules carry over.
Sending stays with you
Every reply is a draft until you approve it. You can let one narrow type go out on its own (invoice acknowledgments tend to be first, since nobody was ever harmed by “got it, thanks”), and each automatic send still shows up in the run record.
We’d keep that list short, for a reason that has little to do with dassi. Email is text from strangers, and some of it is already being written to talk AI assistants into things. The worst thing a draft can do is sit there until you delete it.
Limits
The browser has to be open when the run is due, because that’s where it runs. Laptop asleep in a bag at 07:30 means no triage that morning.
To sort a message the model has to read it, so the content of each email dassi processes goes to the AI provider you picked: under your own key if you brought one, or through dassi’s relay if you’re on included credits. Senders or labels you’d rather keep away from any model can be excluded by a rule, and they’ll sit in the inbox untouched.
Then sign-in. If Gmail has logged you out, dassi uses whatever your browser’s password manager autofills, and Google’s 2-step prompt comes to you. The password stays in the password manager and never goes into a chat or into dassi’s settings.
Setting it up
Write the rules, point it at a handful of replies you’ve sent for each pattern, and read the first digest slowly. Expect to rewrite a rule or two after that. We still haven’t seen a clean rule for the newsletter you archive every week and then go hunting for on Friday afternoon, so maybe that one stays manual.