// the find
elie222/inbox-zero
The world's best AI personal assistant for email. Open source app to help you reach inbox zero fast.
Inbox Zero is a self-hostable AI email assistant built on Next.js that connects to Gmail and Outlook. It lets you define email-handling rules in plain English, auto-drafts replies in your style, and handles the tedious bulk work (unsubscribes, cold email blocking, attachment filing). Targeted at developers and power users who want something like Superhuman but with full control over the data and AI behavior.
The rule engine taking plain-English instructions and converting them to structured actions is the genuinely useful part — it's a real implementation, not a chatbot wrapper. The test suite is unusually thorough for an open-source productivity app: separate AI regression tests, eval harnesses with a judge model, and E2E flows against real email providers with emulators for local dev. Self-hosting story is solid — one CLI command, Docker Compose, and a proper .env.example with every required var documented. Turborepo monorepo structure is well-organized; the separation between the web app, image proxy, and CLI packages is clean.
Gmail-only for the AI features in practice — Microsoft/Outlook support exists but the eval suite has multiple TODO tests and known gaps. The dependency surface is massive: Upstash (Redis), Tinybird (analytics), PostHog, Resend, Prisma, and multiple AI providers — self-hosting this properly means wiring up ~8 external services, which the quick-start glosses over. The AI rules can misfire silently; there's no obvious audit trail in the UI showing why a rule fired on a specific email, making debugging a bad rule painful. Knowledge base / persona features are underdocumented — the SKILL.md files in .claude/ suggest the codebase is partly built by AI agents, which is fine, but the feature boundaries get blurry.