email-agent

A small Node script that reads my inbox, asks Claude what's worth reading, and sends a one-message digest to Telegram every morning. Runs on a Mac mini under my desk. Under $1 a month at my volume (~30 emails a day).

What it does

Once a day it pulls the last ~26 hours of mail over IMAP, runs each message through Claude Haiku for a quick important / low / spam call, summarizes the important ones in one sentence, and posts the whole thing to Telegram.

A digest looks roughly like this:

Daily Email Digest — Thu, Apr 23, 2026
10 email(s) in the last 26h

Important (2):

• ACME Bank: April statement is available, no action required.
  — Your April statement is ready
• Jane Doe: wants a 30-min meeting Friday 2pm about the Q2 plan.
  — Q2 planning — 30 min?

Filtered: 6 low-priority · 2 spam/promo

$0.0224 · 20.6K in / 359 out · 15 calls

That last line is the real Claude spend for the run — a couple of cents, typically.

Stack

TypeScript on Node 20, imapflow + mailparser for mail, @anthropic-ai/sdk for Claude, better-sqlite3 for a small dedupe table so re-runs don't double-notify, the Telegram Bot API for delivery, and launchd for the schedule. No cloud, no Docker, one .env file.

Setup

You need:

• An Anthropic API key — https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys
• IMAP access on your mail account (Yahoo needs an App Password; enable 2FA first)
• A Telegram bot token (/newbot to @BotFather) and your chat ID (message @userinfobot)

Then:

git clone https://github.com/ArtJack/email-agent.git
cd email-agent
npm install
cp .env.example .env          # fill in the secrets
./run.sh test-connection      # does IMAP login work?
./run.sh dry-run              # run the whole pipeline, print the digest, don't send
./run.sh dev                  # for real — sends to Telegram

Running it every morning

On macOS there's a LaunchAgent:

npm run build
./scripts/install-launchd.sh           # fires daily at 10:00
./scripts/install-launchd.sh uninstall # removes it

On Linux, cron is fine:

0 10 * * *  cd /path/to/email-agent && node dist/run.js

How it decides what's important

Triage is a single Haiku call per email with this prompt:

You classify a single email into exactly one of: important, low, spam.

That's it. Haiku is cheap enough that running it on every email is still pennies, and it's correct often enough that the digest actually saves me time. The prompt is in src/claude/triage.ts if you want to make it stricter.

If the triage returns important, a second Haiku call writes the one-sentence summary. Everything else gets counted but not displayed.

Notes / things I'd change

• Only tested against Yahoo. IMAP is generic, so Gmail / Fastmail / anything IMAPS should work — change IMAP_HOST in .env.
• No retries on a failed Telegram or IMAP call. If a run fails I just catch it the next morning. SQLite remembers which message-ids have been processed so reruns are idempotent.
• No allowlist for priority senders yet. Would be useful but I haven't needed one.
• The cost model is baked into src/claude/client.ts — if Anthropic changes prices, update it there.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.