MailSutra: Every idea the chairman emails gets a code, an owner and a trail

The problem

New-business ideas arrived as emails to a shared growth inbox. Each one started a thread, picked up replies, and slowly lost its shape: who took it up, what the next step was, whether it had moved. Progress reports were typed percentages that meant something different to everyone.

MailSutra began as a favour. Someone needed a way to not lose the chairman’s ideas. It turned into a product.

What I decided

Let the inbox stay the inbox. Put a system behind it that reads every idea, gives it an identity, and refuses to accept “70% done” without a milestone.

The process I designed

One code per idea. The scanner picks up every email to the growth address and assigns a code the moment it lands. Related emails thread to that code automatically.
AI for the reading, rules for the record. Gemini writes the title and summary and classifies the idea. A hard daily cap and a keyword fallback mean the system works on the day the API is down or the budget is spent.
Progress by milestones and activity. Never by typed percentages. If nothing has happened, the record says nothing has happened.
Digests. Weekly and monthly summaries go out by email to the people who asked for them.
Sandbox and live modes. Every change is tried on sandbox data first. Unit tests on the parsing, a smoke test on the screens.

The product

Live. Google sign-in restricted to the company domain. Strict content-security headers. An audit trail of who changed what. Setup takes about an hour in a browser; no installs.

Decisions I would defend

The AI budget is a feature. Sixty summaries a day, hard-capped, with a non-AI fallback. The cost of the system is known before anyone uses it.
Milestones over percentages. A typed number is an opinion. A milestone is a fact.