Overview
The friction to reply is the friction to open. This Zap watches your primary inbox, uses GPT-4o-mini to draft a short, on-tone reply grounded in the last thread's context, and saves it as a Gmail draft — never sends. Opening the email shows a draft you either send, edit, or discard.
How it works
- Zap trigger: new email in Gmail, filter to Primary category.
- Filter step excludes newsletters and calendar invites.
- OpenAI step: system prompt = voice guide + 'you are drafting on behalf of {name}'.
- Gmail action: Create Draft in the same thread.
Benefits
- Turns 'reply later' into 'send in one click'.
- Voice guide keeps drafts sounding like you, not like ChatGPT.
- Zero risk of accidental send — drafts only.
Use cases
- Founders, consultants, salespeople with 50+ inbound emails a day.
- Executives who dictate replies to an assistant — this is your assistant.
- Anyone whose reply-latency embarrasses them.
Step-by-step guide
Step 1: Set the Gmail filter
Match Primary category only. Exclude labels: promotions, updates, forums.
Step 2: Author your voice guide
One paragraph: how you open, how you close, sentence length, forbidden words (e.g. 'circle back').
Step 3: Design the prompt
System: voice guide. User: sender, subject, last 3 messages. Ask for a reply under 90 words.
Step 4: Route to Gmail Create Draft
Set threadId so it lands in the correct conversation. Never use Send Email.
Step 5: Review + tune
For the first week, open every draft. Note what you consistently edit — feed that back into the prompt.
Example
Incoming: 'Hey, can we push tomorrow's call to Thursday?'
Draft: 'Thursday works — same time? I'll resend the invite.'