unghost

A nightly Claude skill that watches your Gmail for threads going stale, ranks them, and surfaces them in your morning briefing. Runs unattended in Cowork.

Why

When you're a small team shipping fast, threads slip. Someone takes the time to write a thoughtful note. You reply, they reply, you flag it for "later" — and three weeks go by.

This skill watches for those threads while you sleep, ranks them, and surfaces them in your morning briefing. Not as a to-do list. As a nudge.

What it does

Every night at the time you set:

1. Reads the prior run's Drive doc to pick up the silenced list
2. Scans your Gmail (sent + inbox + archived) for prospect and customer threads
3. For each candidate, deep-reads the thread to compute real "last touch" dates
4. Cross-checks each prospect's domain for activity in other threads — Calendly bookings, calendar invites, meeting recaps. This catches the threads that look stale but aren't (a prospect engaged via a separate thread).
5. Ranks them: 🔴 needs attention now, 🟡 monitor, ✅ healthy
6. Enriches the 🔴 items with one news search per company, in case there's a re-engagement hook
7. Writes a fresh Drive doc and (optionally) posts a one-line Slack summary

You wake up, open the doc, see what needs a reply.

What it does NOT do

It does not draft follow-up emails. It surfaces what needs attention and why. Hand off to your own drafting skill, or write the replies yourself.

Setup

You'll need:

• A Claude account with Cowork enabled
• Gmail and Google Drive connectors enabled in your Cowork project
• (Optional) Slack connector for the morning summary ping

Install

1. Drop SKILL.md into a Cowork project's skills folder
2. Open SKILL.md and search for <<CUSTOMIZE: — there are five placeholders to replace:
   • YOUR_DOMAIN — your work email domain (e.g. acme.com)
   • PRODUCT_KEYWORDS — product names/URLs to catch in sent mail (e.g. "acme widget" OR "widget.com")
   • DRIVE_PARENT_ID — the Drive folder or Shared Drive ID to write into
   • SLACK_DM_ID — your Slack DM ID for the summary (or remove the Slack step)
   • TIMEZONE — IANA timezone for the daily run (e.g. America/New_York)
3. Set up a Cowork automation:
   • Trigger: Daily, off-hours, in your timezone
   • Prompt: Run the unghost skill — full scan, update Drive doc, post Slack summary.
4. (Optional) Trigger it manually the first time to verify

Commands

Once the skill is installed, in addition to the scheduled run, you can say:

• "Run unghost" — manual full scan
• "Silence [name/company]" — stop surfacing a thread for 90 days (or specify a duration)
• "Unsilence [name/company]" — bring it back

How it handles Drive limitations

The Google Drive MCP currently can't update or delete files. So each run creates a new date-stamped doc — Unghost — YYYY-MM-DD. The newest doc is always the source of truth; older runs become an audit trail. Cleanup is a manual drag in the Drive UI, maybe once a month.

License

MIT.

Origin

Built for @leor-mn's inbox after threads kept slipping. Sharing it because most people running a pipeline through email have the same problem.

If you find a bug or want to share an adaptation, file an issue.