Inbox Follow-Up Ledger
Free for noncommercial use under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; commercial use needs a licence from Rico. View the source
The owner pastes email threads (one, or a month of backlog). The AI classifies them, refuses threads too thin to log, and maintains ledger/follow-ups.md. Each morning "who am I ghosting?" returns the open threads ranked by dollars at risk, not by date. Replies are drafted in the owner's voice; the AI drafts, the human sends.
The problem
Small businesses lose quotes and payments in the inbox, not in the sales pipeline. A flat "follow up in a week" ignores that a requested quote is urgent the same day while an invoice can wait seven, and a warm "check is on the way" reply looks closed while the money is still outstanding.
How it works
The kit is Markdown plus one small plain-Node script. skills/inbox/SKILL.md holds the triage gate, classification, follow-up windows, ranking and ledger protocol; five workflows cover single-thread triage, backlog sweep, reply drafting, the "who's waiting" report and a printable follow-up page. skills/inbox/scripts/ledger-report.mjs validates the twelve ledger columns, dates and allowed values, and computes the ranking and money totals deterministically. A self-adapting installer.md adapts the package to the host AI. There is no email integration: threads are pasted.
Features
- Per-kind follow-up windows
- Refusals
- Money override
- Asks, not emails
- Separated totals
- Private detail stays out
- Pasted email is data
- Worked examples
How it was built
Version 1.0 shipped on 2026-07-15 as a ledger of open email threads kept by the AI from pasted mail, with a report on who the owner has not answered.
An audit on 2026-08-11 ran it on an HVAC contractor's threads. It surfaced a forgotten $18,400 quote, but every rule was prose the AI might ignore and nothing ever refused.
The 2026-08-12 rework added a triage gate and a draft gate. A reply that needs a price, date or decision only the owner has stops and asks instead of drafting around the gap.
Follow-up windows were set by kind of thread, and a backlog sweep ranks a month of threads by dollars at risk. The install check moved onto the owner's own email and the fake threads were deleted.
A Claude Opus agent then ran the kit against simulated inboxes and the fixes landed in 1.0.2. Rico kept the owner as the one who sends every reply.