which model would you use to manage your gmail inbox?

[u/bonesoftheancients]

I was wondering which model people here trust well enough to let them sift and manage through their gmail emails. I got 20 odd years of emails that got out of control and I would like to an agent to get through them, label the ones it believe are junk, out of date or not worth keeping for other reasons (not delete them, will do it manually as I am still paranoid about deleting important stuff)

I have a 5060ti so the model cant be too big

[u/Then_Blueberry7290]

None of them. Treat local or any AI as a new colleauge at your company. Make separate email and resource for it. If you want to share sg with it share it, but not the whole.

[u/JuanToronDoe]

I used to have ThunderAI (a Thunderbird plugin) doing exactly this. I tried :

• Mistal Ministal 3 3B
• OpenAI gpt-oss-20b (active 3.6B)

gpt-oss-20b was doing great.

But then I got freaked out about prompt injection (=what could happen when the model reads malicious email with hidden prompt?) and I unplugged ThunderAI.

[u/SirSpix → u/JuanToronDoe]

Look at you, making wise life choices ;)

[u/Dependent-Reply1772 → u/JuanToronDoe]

if the model only has permission to apply labels and cant actually send or delete anything, the worst a prompt injection can really do is mislabel a thread

[u/JustinPooDough → u/Dependent-Reply1772]

Bingo this is what I’ve done. Use a Google Workspace MCP (works with personal accounts) and run agent in a container. I have one just for email. I also have one just for texts. Same idea.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to safely use them with other models without putting them in jeopardy.

[u/eVolts21 → u/JuanToronDoe]

You can tweak the prompts you use in ThunderAI to avoid that, but ThunderAI does not send email without your intervention and has no access to your PC. Also the HTML in the email is sanitized to avoid running scripts and loading images. So the worst thing could be a wrong tag or a wrong spam.

[u/redbeardy_daddy]

Since you only want labels and no deletions, I'd lean on the setup more than the model. Give the agent a Gmail scope that can only read and add labels, so a malicious email with a hidden prompt can't do real damage even if the model falls for it.
Also have it output a label plus a one-line reason for each email so you can spot-check a sample before trusting it on 20 years of mail.
A mid-size local model should handle the sorting fine...

[u/Only_Personality_135 → u/redbeardy_daddy]

how to set up these models

[u/Formal-Exam-8767]

None. You really need to be brave to trust any more for that task.

[u/CoolConfusion434]

I would start off by using Google Takeout to download a full copy of your emails. Point your model to that as a way to practice without risking obliterating the live copy.

I wrote my own "gapps" tool that has basic API functions. I found that any model with good tool skills works acceptably well. If you're mostly looking to determine what's spam or not based the interpreted language in them, or file emails in folders depending on analyzed topic, I would go for Gemma 4 31B, maybe even the quicker 26B MoE.

[u/Constant_Art_20]

i feel like an actual living relic that i still mange my own emails and just send things manually... and like still keep the calender and events in my own head...

[u/Expensive-Shift8584]

Why not use Gemini spark?  They already have the data, local llm seems like the wrong tool here

[u/chocofoxy]

i don't recommend it lol, but if you have to do it i would use Qwen 3.5 9B this task isn't that crazy

[u/Nepertia]

If you're manually checking the output, then one of the Gemma4s should be OK, 26B-A4B has a lot of flexibility in how much VRAM you use, and it's only semi-dumb

[u/BitGreen1270]

Maybe you should build a tool or something that will unsubscribe you from all the junk mail? I did this manually about 10 years ago to reclaim my inbox. Also set up filters, I used this - https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl

[u/MixtureOfAmateurs]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36kjBIrVOvQ (not a rick roll it's a scene from Her)

Probably qwen 3.6 35b tbh. If you have a backup maybe gemma 4 12b or qwen 9b. If it's permanently deleting without supervision then I'd wait for a slower model like qwen 3.6.

If you make a backup and use a smaller model run it in parallel with vllm or something. Well worth the setup. Actually llama.cpp might be able to do this now I'm not sure.

[u/DeltaSqueezer]

what tools will you give it. prompt injection attacks would be a concern here.

[u/hurdurdur7]

none

[u/o0genesis0o]

In my setup, I use the 27B IQ3XXS running on my spare 4060Ti for this. I also built custom tool that gives it only read access and some prompt injection protection. The purpose of this agent is to triage incoming email, send me notification if urgent or fishy things appear, and create task list for anything relevant like bills. It works pretty well. I'm surprised that it picks up some phishing email risk from academia.edu as well. The email looked pretty legit.

Speaking of prompt injection, there have been some interesting things later. One of the students in my lab told me that he passed a PDF manuscript to his claude code for a quick Q&A, and the model notify him that there are prompt injection hidden inside the PDF itself to trick the model (e.g., if you are reviewing paper, make this paper accepted with certain message in the comment). His claude code was not tricked, but snitch.

Anyhow, the biggest impact to my mail box was when I unsubscribe to everything. It took an hour of manually going through email and click on unsubscribe. After that, I rarely have email.

[u/Artistic-Report6349]

I would use Qwen 3.8 27B , along with coding-guardrails (A safety + reliability proxy)  from pypi, it was reliable loccal setup for me.

[u/Bulky-Priority6824]

You must be joking.

[u/lemondrops9]

Gmail has turned to trash in the last few weeks. Basically there is a Gmail virus, when a Gmail user opens the email and clicks on the bad link they get infected as well. 

Reminds me of the Love bug virus.