Herman, have you looked at your inbox today? I mean, really looked at it? It is like a digital archaeological dig in there.
Herman Poppleberry here, and yes, Corn, I have. It is a terrifying landscape of newsletters I do not remember signing up for and project updates that could have been a single sentence. It is funny you bring that up because our housemate Daniel sent us a voice prompt that hits on exactly that pain point. He is thinking about a business idea that is basically a gateway between your outbox and the recipient to stop the flood.
I love that. Daniel always has these ideas that feel like they should already exist but somehow do not quite work the way we want them to. He is basically proposing a middleware for communication. Instead of firing off ten emails to a client in a single afternoon, this tool catches them, holds them, and then presents them as a single, organized brief.
Exactly. And the agency angle he mentioned is particularly sharp. If you are an agency managing twenty clients, you are constantly sending these little pings. One update about a graphic design change, another about a budget tweak, maybe a third about a meeting schedule. To the client, that feels like being pecked to death by ducks.
Pecked to death by ducks. That is a vivid image, Herman. But it is true. It creates this sense of chaos even if the work is actually going well. So, let us really dig into this. If we were building this Briefing Gateway, as Daniel calls it, how would we actually make it work? Because the technical hurdles are as interesting as the business ones.
Right. First, we have to talk about the integration layer. Most people hear gateway and think of a complicated server setup, but in February twenty twenty-six, we have much more elegant options. You could build this as a simple Simple Mail Transfer Protocol relay, but that is a bit old school and prone to getting flagged by modern spam filters. The more robust approach would be through the Application Programming Interfaces of Gmail and Outlook, or even the newer J-Map protocol which is gaining a lot of traction for its efficiency.
That makes sense. You would basically have the user authorize the tool via Open Authorization, or O-Auth, and then the tool monitors the outbox. But here is the nuance, Herman. Does it actually stop the email from leaving the sender's domain, or does it just intercept the message and hold it in its own database until the release trigger?
That is the big architectural question. If I were building it, I would want it to feel seamless for the sender. You hit send in your normal email client, and the tool catches it. It could do this by acting as a virtual assistant that you carbon copy, or more elegantly, it could be a background service using the Microsoft Graph or Google Workspace S-D-Ks to watch your sent folder and immediately move the message to a draft or a holding area. Recalling emails is still notoriously unreliable across different providers, so the interception has to happen before the message hits the open web.
Yeah, you cannot count on a recall working if you are sending from Gmail to a private corporate server. So, maybe the better way is a dedicated outbox. Instead of hitting send to the client's direct address, you send it to a unique address provided by the gateway. Like, client-name at my-briefing-tool dot com. The tool then aggregates everything sent to that address.
That is much more robust. It also gives you a centralized place to apply the Natural Language Processing, or N-L-P, that would be required to make this actually useful. Because if you just bundle ten emails together, you are just sending one giant, messy email. The real value is in the consolidation and the brief.
Right, and that is where the A-I comes in. We are not just talking about copy-pasting text. We are talking about a tool that can look at five different emails about a website launch and say, here are the three major updates: the hero image is approved, the server migration is scheduled for Tuesday, and we are still waiting on the copy for the about page.
Precisely. You use a Large Language Model—something like G-P-T-five or the latest Claude models—to summarize the day's activity. But you have to be careful with the accuracy. You would want the tool to provide the summary at the top, but still allow the recipient to click and expand the original full emails if they need the granular detail. It is all about the information hierarchy.
I want to talk about that emergency override feature Daniel mentioned. That seems critical. Because if I am an agency and the client's website just crashed, I cannot have that update sitting in a buffer for six hours waiting for the daily brief.
That is the most important edge case. You could handle that in a few ways. One would be a keyword trigger. If the email contains words like urgent or emergency or critical, the gateway bypasses the hold and sends it immediately. But that is easy to abuse. I know people who mark every email as high priority.
We all know those people. They are the reason we need this tool in the first place!
True. So, maybe the better way is a U-I-based override. When you send the email to the gateway address, you could append a tag to the subject line, like plus now. So, if I send it to client-name plus now at my-gateway dot com, it knows to skip the queue. It gives the sender the intentionality. They have to make a conscious choice that this specific message is a breaker.
That is smart. It forces the sender to categorize their own communication. It is almost like a mindfulness practice for business correspondence. Do I really need to bother them right now, or can this wait until five o'clock?
And then you have the maximum intervals. Daniel suggested setting limits on how long things stay in the outbox. I think you would want this to be highly customizable. Maybe for a high-touch client, they get a brief every four hours. For a long-term partner, it is once a day at the end of business.
I can see a lot of second-order effects here, Herman. Think about the psychological impact on the recipient. If I know that I am only going to get one email from my agency at four thirty every afternoon, I am not going to be checking my inbox for their updates all day. It actually reduces my cognitive load. I can focus on my work knowing that the summary is coming.
It turns a push communication style into something that feels more like a pull, or at least a scheduled delivery. It is like the difference between someone knocking on your door every twenty minutes and someone leaving a neatly organized folder on your desk at the end of the day.
But what about the agency side? There is a risk here, right? Some clients might feel like the agency is not working if they do not see those constant pings. There is this weird performance of productivity that happens with email. If I send you an email at eleven P-M, I am showing you how hard I am working.
That is a very real cultural hurdle. But I think you could counter that by including a timestamp log in the brief. The brief could say, here is what we did today, and then list the activities with their actual completion times. It actually makes the agency look more professional. It shows they have a process and they respect the client's time. It moves the relationship from frantic to focused.
That is a great point. It is a shift from performative busyness to actual results. Now, let us get technical again for a second. How would you handle attachments? That seems like it could get messy if you are consolidating multiple emails with various versions of a P-D-F or an image.
That is a classic version control problem. The gateway would need its own storage layer—maybe an S-three bucket with a vector database to track file similarities. Instead of attaching the files directly to the final brief, which could make the email massive and hit size limits, the tool should host the files and provide a clean list of links in the brief. It could even do something clever like highlighting only the most recent version of a document if multiple versions were sent throughout the day.
Oh, that would be huge. No more scrolling through a thread trying to find which document-final-version-two-actual-final dot p-d-f is the right one. The tool just says, here is the current state of all files shared today.
Exactly. And if you really want to go deep, you could integrate this with project management tools like Asana or Jira. The gateway could cross-reference the emails with the project tasks and say, these updates relate to task number four hundred twelve. It becomes a bridge between your communication and your actual workflow.
We are starting to describe something much bigger than just an email filter. We are talking about an automated account manager. Which leads me to the business model. Daniel mentioned this is great for agencies. I can see this being a per-seat subscription model, but also maybe a per-client model. If I am an agency, I might pay fifty dollars a month to have this gateway for my top-tier clients.
I think the value proposition is so high that you could even charge based on the time saved. But realistically, a S-A-A-S model—Software as a Service—is the way to go. You would want a free tier for individuals and then a professional tier for agencies that includes the A-I summarization and the custom branding. Because the agency would want that brief to look beautiful. It should not look like a robot sent it; it should look like a premium report.
It should have the agency's logo, a nice layout, maybe even a sentiment analysis of how the project is going. Imagine the brief starting with, overall, the project is on track and the team is feeling confident.
Now you are talking about my favorite part, Corn. The data analytics. If you are the agency owner, you can look at the gateway's dashboard and see which clients are getting the most updates and which employees are sending the most overrides. If one account manager is overriding the system twenty times a day, you have a training opportunity. Why are we bothering the client so much? Is there a crisis, or is the account manager just disorganized?
It provides visibility into the communication health of the entire company. That is a massive selling point for a C-E-O or an operations manager. They usually have no idea what is happening in the thousands of emails their team sends every day. This tool would aggregate that data and give them a high-level view of client engagement.
It is basically a communication audit that happens in real-time. I am actually surprised something like this hasn't dominated the market yet. There are tools like Boomerang or Batched Inbox, but those are usually focused on the recipient's side. They help you, the receiver, manage your own incoming mail. Daniel's idea is focused on the sender managing their output for the benefit of the receiver. That is a subtle but profound difference in philosophy.
It is about being a good digital citizen. It is saying, I care enough about your time to not flood your inbox. It is a premium service. I could see a world where having a Briefing Gateway becomes a mark of a high-end agency. It is like having a nice office or a polished pitch deck. It shows you have your act together.
I agree. But let us talk about the risks. Privacy and security are the big ones here. If I am a client and my agency tells me all our communications are going through this third-party middleware that uses A-I to summarize our secret project details, I might be a little nervous.
That is the hurdle. You would need serious encryption. End-to-end encryption would be tough if the A-I needs to read the text to summarize it. So you would need to use a provider that guarantees data privacy—like an enterprise-grade A-P-I where the data is not used for training the models. And you would need to be very transparent about that with the clients.
You might even need to offer an on-premise version for really sensitive industries like law or finance. But for most creative or marketing agencies, a secure cloud-based version would probably be enough as long as the compliance checkboxes are marked.
I think you could also build in a feature where the client has to opt-in. The agency says, we use this tool to respect your time and provide better updates, would you like to receive our daily briefs or continue with individual emails? Most busy executives would jump at the chance for the brief.
I would. If I could get one email at the end of the day instead of thirty, I would pay for that myself. Which is another interesting angle—could the recipient be the one who pays for it? Probably not in an agency-client relationship, but maybe in other contexts.
It is usually the person who wants to improve the relationship who pays for the tool. In this case, that is the agency. They want to keep the client happy so the client keeps paying their retainer.
By the way, Corn, if you are enjoying this deep dive into Daniel's business ideas, you should really leave us a review on your podcast app. We have been doing this for over five hundred episodes, and those reviews really help other people find the show. It is the best way to support what we are doing here in Jerusalem.
Yeah, it genuinely makes a difference. And it helps us know what kind of topics you guys want to hear more about. Anyway, back to the gateway. Let us think about the development roadmap. If you were going to build a Minimum Viable Product, or M-V-P, of this tomorrow, where would you start?
I would start with a simple Python-based proxy. I would use the Gmail A-P-I to watch a specific label. Let us say you label an email as brief me. The tool then pulls all emails with that label once every twenty-four hours, sends the text to a Large Language Model—like G-P-T-five or something similar—with a very specific prompt to create a bulleted summary, and then emails that summary to a pre-defined address. No fancy U-I, just a script that runs on a schedule.
That is a great proof of concept. You could probably build that in a weekend. Then you could test it with one or two friendly clients. You see how the A-I handles the summarization. Does it miss key details? Does it get the tone right?
The tone is the tricky part. You would want the A-I to adopt the voice of the agency. You do not want it to sound like a cold, clinical summary. It should sound like, hey, we had a productive day, here is where we are. You could actually feed the agency's previous successful reports into the model as examples to help it learn the style.
And then phase two would be the emergency override and the attachment handling. That is where the engineering gets a bit more complex. You need a database to store the state of the various emails and the files. You need a way to track which emails have already been briefed and which ones are still pending.
Right, and you need a robust queueing system. If the A-I service goes down for an hour, you cannot just lose those emails. They need to stay in the queue until the service is back up. Reliability is everything for a communication tool. If you miss one important update, the client loses trust in the whole system.
That is the biggest risk. The moment the tool fails and a critical piece of information is lost in the void, the experiment is over. So you would need a lot of redundancies. Maybe a fail-safe where if the tool hasn't sent a brief within a certain window, it just forwards all the original emails as a backup.
A dead-man's switch for email. I love it. It is also worth considering the international angle. Agencies often work across time zones. The gateway should be smart enough to know that four thirty P-M for the agency in Jerusalem is not the same as four thirty P-M for the client in New York. The brief should be delivered when the recipient is most likely to actually read it.
That is a brilliant feature. You are not just batching; you are optimizing for the recipient's biological clock and work schedule. You could even use data to see when they usually open their emails and aim for that window.
We are getting into some very high-level optimization here, but that is what makes this a real business and not just a simple script. The more value you add through timing, summarization, and organization, the more indispensable you become.
I can see this expanding beyond email too. What about Slack? Many agencies use Slack with their clients, and that is even more prone to flooding. Could this gateway consolidate Slack messages into a daily brief?
Oh, absolutely. Slack is the ultimate offender when it comes to the pecked to death by ducks problem. A tool that could scrape a specific Slack channel and turn the day's chatter into a coherent three-paragraph summary would be a godsend. The architecture would be similar—using the Slack A-P-I to monitor messages and then applying the same N-L-P and delivery logic.
It becomes a unified communication layer. It doesn't matter if the update came via email, Slack, or even a voice memo. The gateway catches it all and presents it as a single source of truth.
That is the dream, Corn. A single source of truth that respects your time. It is funny, we started with a simple idea from Daniel about an email outbox, and we have ended up with a vision for a comprehensive communication management system.
That is usually how it goes with these prompts. You start pulling on a thread and you realize there is a whole sweater there. But let us bring it back to the practical side for a second. If someone is listening to this and they are in an agency, what can they do right now, even without this tool?
Well, the low-tech version is just discipline. You can tell your team that we only send client updates in a single email at the end of the day. You create a shared document where everyone adds their updates throughout the day, and then the account manager polishes it and sends it at five o'clock.
It is a manual version of the gateway. It takes more work, but it proves the concept. If the client loves those daily updates, then you know it is worth either building or buying a tool to automate it.
Exactly. It is about the principle of batching. We know from every productivity study ever done that task-switching is a killer. This tool just applies that lesson to the way we communicate with others. We are helping our clients avoid task-switching by not interrupting them every thirty minutes.
It is an act of service. It is saying, I value your focus as much as I value my own. And in a world that is increasingly noisy and fragmented, that kind of focus is becoming the ultimate luxury.
It really is. I think Daniel is onto something here. It is a business that solves a very modern, very frustrating problem. And with the A-I tools we have available now, it is finally feasible to build it in a way that feels human and not robotic.
I agree. It is one of those ideas that feels inevitable. Someone is going to build this and it is going to become a standard part of the professional toolkit. Maybe it will be someone listening to this episode!
If you do build it, let us know. We would love to be the first beta testers. I can think of a few people whose emails I would love to have summarized and batched.
I am not saying any names, but yes, me too. This has been a fascinating exploration. It is amazing how much depth there is in the simple act of sending an email.
It is the lifeblood of business, Corn. If you can make it flow better, everything else gets better too. I think we have given Daniel plenty to think about.
Definitely. This was a great one. And thanks again to everyone for listening to My Weird Prompts. We really appreciate you spending your time with us.
We really do. You can find all our past episodes and a way to get in touch at my weird prompts dot com. We are also on Spotify and most other podcast apps.
Alright, I think that is a wrap for today. Herman, I will see you in the kitchen for some coffee?
You bet. Maybe we can discuss how to batch our grocery list.
One brief at the end of the week? Sounds like a plan.
Until next time, everyone.
Bye for now.
