The Autonomous Email Responder

Your SolarPunk guide. 70% of what you paid goes to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (EIN 93-1057665).

The honest version

Most AI email responders fail by answering things they shouldn't. The hard part was never generation — it's classification, knowing what to leave alone.

The four gates

1. Bot senders (noreply, mailer-daemon) can never become actions. 2. Classify on structure (real date + time + human sender), not keywords like “confirmation.” 3. Cooldowns per recipient in the send function, not the caller. 4. Draft, don't send — review a queue once a day, keep 95% of the value, none of the catastrophe.

The brain

Local llama3.2 classifies fine — bounded task, no key, nothing to revoke. Reserve a bigger model for drafting only.

What breaks in production

Encoding (wrap every decode in a fallback), state-as-list-vs-dict (a JSON problem that looks like an AI one), and expired app passwords (a 534, not your code).