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name: gmail-watch description: "Detection engine for Gmail email watches: iterates the watch list, polls gws for new matching mail per watch, dedups, drops automated/self, and hands matches (labeled by sender) to the shared drafting turn. Provisioned and run automatically by the shared email-watch backing job." license: MIT compatibility: "macOS and Linux. Requires the gws CLI authenticated against a Google account with Gmail scopes." metadata: gini: version: 1.0.0 author: Gini platforms: [macos, linux] prerequisites: commands: [gws]

Gmail Watch

This skill ships the detection engine behind your email watches. It is not something you run by hand — when you create an email watch (email_watch tool, gini email add, or the settings UI), Gini adds it to ONE shared background job whose pre-run hook runs this skill's detect script on a schedule. All of your watches share that one job and one "Email watch" chat thread; the script decides which watches have new mail to draft a reply to.

What it does

Each time the shared watch job fires, detect runs headless (no model turn, no approval) and, for EACH of your watches:

1. Checks the Google sign-in (once for the session). If signed out, every watch reports needs_auth and nothing is drafted — the watches stay active and recover the moment you re-authenticate.
2. Lists new mail matching that watch's query via gws, bounded by a per-watch watermark so steady-state polling lists almost nothing.
3. Drops automated senders (no-reply, mailer-daemon, notifications, …) and your own address — only real, human, new mail survives.
4. Hands each surviving match (its sender / Subject / Date / snippet only — never the body), labeled by sender, to the drafting turn as quoted, untrusted data.

Each watch is independent: one sender's transient error marks only that watch and the others keep working. When nothing new matches across all your watches, the run ends with no model turn at all — the watches are silent until there is something to act on.

How a match becomes a reply

The detection floor reads only metadata. One drafting turn then handles all the matches for that tick in the shared thread: it reads each full message and composes a reply per email — each labeled by sender — through the google-gmail skill, posts the proposed replies for you to review, and sends only when you explicitly ask (which runs gws gmail +reply through the normal approval gate).

Stateful but pure

detect is a pure function of your watch list and the small per-watch cursors it is handed each run; it never writes to disk itself. Gini stores those cursors on the shared watch job and advances each only after a drafting turn is dispatched, so a match is never silently lost if delivery fails — it re-surfaces on the next run.

First run baselines

The first time each watch runs it records where your inbox currently is and drafts nothing for pre-existing mail — only mail that arrives after the watch was created triggers a reply. A newly added watch baselines on its own first tick, independently of your existing watches.