Forgotten work

Two things make email feel like dropped balls: promises you typed into a draft and forgot about, and inbound threads that quietly aged past the speed at which you usually reply. mxr surfaces both, using only local data: extracted commitments from sent mail, and an “owed reply” lens that ranks the replies you owe people against how fast you usually answer them.

The one-line mental model

Commitments come out of your sent mail; the owed-reply lens looks at threads where you owe in. Both are deterministic ledgers: no LLM is required for the owed lens; the commitments extractor uses an LLM only to confirm a deterministic prefilter match.

Commitments: promises you made

When mxr send DRAFT_ID --check (or any real send) runs the safety pipeline, it scans the draft body for explicit outgoing commitments: “I’ll send the deck Friday”, “I’ll get back to you next week”, “I can review by EOD Monday”. Each match becomes a candidate scoped to the draft. On successful send, candidates promote into the canonical contact_commitments ledger and show up in mxr commitments.

# Before sending: see the candidates the pipeline extracted.
mxr send DRAFT_ID --check --format json \
  | jq '.issues[] | select(.code == "commitment_candidate")'

# After a real send: candidate is now in the ledger.
mxr commitments --status open --format json

What you get: a JSON array of rows like { id, contact_email, direction, what, by_when, evidence_msg_id, status, created_at }. direction is yours (you owe work) or theirs (they owe you). Every row has a message id you can mxr cat to read the original.

List, filter, and resolve

# List everything still open across all contacts.
mxr commitments --status open --format json

# Just one person:
mxr commitments --contact alice@example.com --format json

# Mark done after you've shipped it.
mxr commitments resolve COMMITMENT_ID

# Daily standup: what did I commit to this week that's still open?
mxr commitments --status open --format json \
  | jq -r '.[] | select(.created_at > (now - 7*24*3600))
           | "\(.by_when // "unscheduled")\t\(.contact_email)\t\(.what)"' \
  | sort

What you get: one row per open commitment from the last 7 days, tab-separated, sorted by due date. Pipe into column -t or paste straight into a standup doc.

When the LLM is off

The extractor’s prefilter is pure regex on first-person commitment markers (I'll, I will, I can, I'll send, …) and due-phrases (weekday, date, tomorrow, next week, by EOD). When the LLM is disabled or unreachable, deterministic prefilter matches still surface as low-confidence candidates in the safety report; they just don’t get promoted into the ledger automatically. Run with --check to see them and decide.

mxr send DRAFT_ID --check --no-llm --format json \
  | jq '.issues[] | select(.code == "commitment_candidate")'

Owed-reply lens: threads where you’re the bottleneck

mxr owed lists the desk’s You owe lane in full, for one account: conversations in your inbox where someone you have written to wrote last and you have not replied. Newsletters, notifications, strangers and archived mail are not on it. A sender you allowed in the screener but never wrote to is in the desk’s New from people instead. The exact rules are in the desk reference.

Rows come most overdue first. overdue_score is waiting_days / expected_days, where expected_days is how long you usually take to reply to that person (usual_seconds, the median of your past replies, with at least two of them), or one day when there is no history.

# Top 20 replies you owe, most overdue first.
mxr owed --format json | jq -r '.[0:20][]
  | "\(.overdue_score | tostring | .[0:4])\t\(.from_email)\t\(.subject)"'

What you get: tab-separated rows score \t sender \t subject. Score 1.0 means exactly your usual reply time; 3.0 means three times longer.

Rows and the raw list

mxr owed --format json returns one row per conversation (thread_id, latest_inbound_msg_id, from_email, from_name, subject, latest_inbound_at, waiting_days, expected_days, overdue_score, and usual_seconds when known).

mxr owed --all is the raw list the desk filters: every conversation whose latest inbound message has no later reply from you, archived or not, automated senders included (list senders and screener-denied senders are left out). It ranks by the sender’s contact cadence (cadence_days_p50), falling back to the average of every contact’s cadence, then 7 days, never below half a day. The is:owed-reply search operator matches this raw set, so you can combine it with other operators (is:owed-reply from:dana@acme.com).

Narrow by age

The windows apply to the latest message from them:

# Only replies waiting >= 14 days.
mxr owed --since 14 --format json

# Only replies whose latest message landed in the last 10 days.
mxr owed --within 10 --format json

# The raw list, skipping ancient unanswered relics.
mxr owed --all --since 7 --within 60 --format json

The default list only looks at conversations active in the last 30 days, like the desk, apart from ones you set to reply later. Use --all to reach older threads.

In real life

• Friday standup prep: mxr commitments --status open --format json | jq '.[] | select(.direction == "yours") | {who: .contact_email, what, due: .by_when}' lists every open promise across every contact, grouped by who’s waiting.
• Inbox-zero focus session: mxr owed --since 3 --format ids | head -10 | xargs -I{} mxr thread {} --format json pulls the top 10 overdue threads so you can read them in batch and reply down the list.
• Quarter-end review: mxr commitments --status open --format json | jq '[.[] | select(.direction == "theirs")] | length' counts how many things people owe you that have been sitting open.
• Pre-send sanity: before queuing 8 replies in a row, check mxr commitments --contact alice@example.com so you don’t promise the same deck twice.

Agent prompts that work

"For every open commitment in `mxr commitments --status open --format
json` where `direction == "yours"` and `by_when` is in the past, draft a
short status-update reply with `mxr draft-assist <evidence_msg_id>`.
Don't send; show me the drafts."

"List the top 10 owed-reply threads from `mxr owed --since 5 --format
json`. For each, summarize the latest inbound with `mxr summarize
<thread_id>`. End with a single recommended verb per thread: REPLY,
ARCHIVE, DELEGATE."

See also

• Pre-send safety: where the commitment candidates are extracted
• Automated follow-ups: reminders and send-later for the outbound side
• Search workflow: the is:owed-reply operator
• LLM features: configure the model used for commitment extraction
• CLI: mxr commitments, mxr owed, mxr send