Personal CRM from your email

Relationships slipped through the cracks. Now I get a weekly list of who to reconnect with.

The workflow

1. Let Gemini scan your recent threads
2. Ask for contacts you have gone quiet on
3. Add a suggested opener for each
4. Send two reconnects a day

Result: A living contact list instead of a guilty conscience.

The prompt

From my recent email, list 10 contacts I have not replied to or followed up with, with a one line reason to reconnect.

A note on what follows. The workflow, the prompt and the result above come from the member. The notes below (why the prompt works, what to watch for, how to adapt it) were written with AI help.

Why this prompt works

The useful half is "not replied to or followed up with", because that is a gap, and a gap is invisible in an inbox. My inbox shows me what arrived, never what I dropped. Asking for a reason to reconnect was an afterthought that turned out to carry the whole thing: without it I got a list of names and did nothing with it, since deciding what to say was the actual work. Ten is about right. Twenty and I ignore the list. Before anyone copies this, think about what you are handing over. I run it on a work account with no client contracts in it, and I would not point it at a personal inbox. Your employer may also have a view on that, and mine did.

What to watch for

• Silence that was deliberate. Some people I stopped replying to on purpose, and they come back up the list every single time.
• It cannot see other channels. Half my follow-ups happen on LinkedIn or in person, so they read as ignored.
• Newsletters and no-reply addresses land in the list as contacts unless you exclude them.
• The reason to reconnect is invented more often than the name is. It will confidently reference a project that was never discussed.

How to adapt it

• Cut the noise first: Ignore newsletters, no-reply addresses and anyone inside my company.
• To keep it grounded, add Quote the last message from each person instead of summarising it. Invented reasons drop off immediately.
• For pipeline rather than relationships, add Only include people who asked a question I never answered.

What good output looks like

I should wince at two or three names. That is the sign it found real gaps rather than listing my most recent threads. Each reason should quote something they actually wrote, and if I cannot find that line in the thread I drop the whole row. Anything older than about six months I skip regardless, because reconnecting on a nine month old email reads worse than staying quiet.