Gmail Tracking

Gmail tracking

The Gmail check reads replies from employers and moves each application forward on its own, with the reason taken from the email.

Set it up

1. Turn on 2-Step Verification for your Google account.
2. Create an app password: myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, name it "Apply Desk", copy the 16 letters.
3. Settings → Gmail replies: enter your Gmail address and the app password, turn on Check Gmail, save.
4. Schedules → turn on Gmail replies (every 2 hours by default), or click Check email on Ready or Applied any time.

The app password is stored in ~/.config/applydesk/config.json and is never shown again.

What it does with each email

The email is	The application moves to
A confirmation ("we received your application")	Applied (also marks a Ready draft or a skipped row as applied)
An assessment or test invitation	Interview
An interview invitation	Interview
An offer	Offer
A rejection	Rejected, with the reason

Rules:

• Forward only. Status never moves back, and a rejection never overwrites an offer.
• Same role. A confirmation for a different role at the same company gets its own row instead of marking your draft.
• Untracked applications (ones you sent outside Apply Desk) get a new row.
• Each update adds a dated note with the reason and the email subject, shown on the Applied page.
• Recruiter cold outreach, job alerts, one-time codes, match-score emails and "complete your application" reminders are ignored.

How it reads your mail

• Read-only IMAP on [Gmail]/All Mail, so archived replies count too. Nothing is marked read, moved or deleted.
• A Gmail search narrows the mail to likely job emails (application, interview, offer, candidate, assessment ...), excluding sent mail, chats, promotions and social.
• The first check looks back 180 days. After that it only fetches mail newer than the last one it checked, so a routine check takes seconds.
• Emails are fetched in batches of 120, with the full body (plain text or HTML, links stripped), and classified in one Claude call per batch using the scoring model.
• Email content is treated as untrusted data. Emails mentioning a name in app/data/banned_names.txt are skipped.

Re-checking everything

Delete app/data/gmail_state.json, app/data/gmail_seen.json and app/data/gmail_backfilled, then run a check. It reads the last 180 days again.