Email Buddy: An LLM-Enhanced Inbox

Your Journey

For this app, I mostly used the Nylas Email APIs, but I also used the Authentication API to exchange a token for a grant. The token exchange is used to simulate a login/logout flow.

From the Email APIs, I made use of:

• Thread retrieval.


• Folder retrieval.


• Message retrieval.


• Message sending.


• Updating threads.


• Draft creation.

From this project, I learned a few things:

1. Nylas makes working with emails really simple.


2. Integrating Nylas with OpenAI was also really simple.


3. Defining an MVP for an app is easy, but building it might not be. Designing and building a UI can often be the most time consuming part of a project.

As far as the third bullet point goes, I am a backend software engineer for my day job. The hardest part of this project, for me, was developing all the frontend components. For example, I had to bring in TanStack Query to share state across components. Before this project, I had no experience with TanStack Query. So picking this up on the fly did add a layer of stress, but was ultimately worthwhile. For future contests/hackathons, I think I will have to spend more time simplifying an idea before iterating on it.

What I'm most proud of is just getting this project to a stopping point 😅. While working on it, I found that email inboxes can be a real rabbit hole where the complexity can quickly get out of control for one person.