Draft polite follow-ups for emails that never got a reply

Every weekday at 4pm, using a cron trigger, catch the email threads I have let go cold and stage polite follow-up drafts for me to review. Never send anything automatically. Drafts only is the hard rule for this workflow.

Start with Aurinko "List Email Messages" to pull everything I sent to external recipients in the last 14 days. Then search the same mailbox again for later messages from those same recipients, and work out which of my threads never got a reply by matching on participants plus subject or the thread id returned on the message records. Aurinko exposes no thread-fetch operation, so reply detection has to be done this way, by listing messages and comparing them rather than by loading a conversation directly.

Only treat a thread as cold when the newest message in it is mine and no reply came back afterwards. Skip anything less than 3 days old, since I do not want to chase people who have simply not got to it yet. Also skip newsletters and bulk mail, no-reply and do-not-reply senders, automated receipts and system notifications, and any recipient on my own email domain, because colleagues are not who I am chasing here.

Before nudging anyone, read the "Follow-ups" tab of my Google Sheets tracking spreadsheet with "Get Values". If a recipient already appears there with a nudge logged in the last 10 days, leave them alone this run so nobody gets chased twice. The sheet is the memory that stops this workflow becoming annoying.

For each thread that survives those filters, use Aurinko "Create Draft" to stage a short, polite follow-up in that same thread, addressed to the original recipient and keeping the existing subject so it reads as a continuation rather than a fresh email. Read what I actually wrote and reference the specific ask or question I left hanging, for example the proposal I sent, the times I offered, or the document I asked them to look over. Keep it to a few sentences, warm and low pressure, with a clear next step. Leave every one as a draft and never send it.

Log every new nudge back to the "Follow-ups" tab with "Append Values", one row per draft, recording the date, the recipient, the subject, how many days the thread has been waiting, and a short note on what I originally asked for.

Finish with a single Slack Bot "Send a Message" direct message to me. Resolve my Slack user with "Look Up User by Email" if a user id is needed. Rank the list by how long each thread has been silent, longest wait first, and for each one give the recipient, the subject, and the days waiting. Close the message with a one-line reminder that the drafts are sitting in my mailbox ready to review and send. Send exactly one message covering the whole run, and if nothing qualified on a given day, skip the Slack message entirely rather than sending an empty summary.