They needed Gmail read and send. We built it in 46 minutes

A business we work with ran its front desk on personal Gmail accounts. Email was their biggest daily bottleneck. Their office manager wanted Marling to read incoming messages, draft replies, and let her team review and send them. That request also exposed a bigger problem: the business depended on personal email accounts it couldn’t centrally manage.

The initial estimate on our table was two to three days of work, and that was only to read the inbox. Sending was supposed to wait for a later release.

Around 10 PM ET on a Thursday night, I looked at the scope and said, “I don’t believe it’s two to three days of code.” I also wasn’t going to hand the business half the workflow they asked for. Sending belonged in the same build.

At 10:09 PM ET, we started writing code. At 10:55 PM ET, 46 minutes later, both reading and sending were merged with every test passing. By midnight ET, we had proven both capabilities against my own live Gmail account on an internal test device. The next morning, we ran two short passes so replies stay in the same Gmail thread and feed into the Home brief.

What your team gets in the office

When you run a business, the inbox is where the day piles up. Scheduling questions, intake follow-ups, records requests, and routine replies pull your team away from the customers in front of them.

Marling runs on a small device in your office. Your team connects their Gmail account on Home, and Marling reads incoming messages without marking unread mail as read, so it never clears a notification someone relies on. From there, it proposes follow-ups and prepares draft replies for your team to review on Home.

When a reply is ready, a person is always the one who sends it. The AI has no tool to send an email on its own, and any unconfirmed send attempt is refused outright. Your office manager opens the draft on Home, edits whatever they want, and presses Send. Marling then shows every recipient on a confirmation screen and waits for them to press Send a second time. The sent reply stays in the same Gmail thread and lands in the user’s Sent folder.

On Mental Health and Legal plans, De-identification checks requests on the device for customer names and identifiers, replaces the details it recognizes with stand-ins before the request reaches an AI model over the internet, and restores them in the reply. The substance of the request still reaches the AI model.

Fast doesn’t mean cutting corners

Shipping a live email feature in 46 minutes works because we pair rapid build sessions with independent code review and live-account testing before a business ever sees the change.

That Thursday night, every security boundary was reviewed before the branch could merge, and the merged code went straight onto our test hardware against a real inbox. We verified that unread messages stayed unread, that the chat assistant could not trigger a send, and that a two-step reviewed send landed cleanly in Gmail. Only after it passed on our own inbox did we turn it on for the business.

Why personal Gmail was a security risk, and what we built next

Connecting their personal Gmail accounts addressed the immediate email bottleneck, and it also put a much larger security problem in plain sight. With personal @gmail.com accounts, access sits with each account holder. The business has no central administrator who can suspend an account when someone leaves, reset a password, or require two-step verification across the team. Keeping customer correspondence depends on access to those individual accounts, and the business has no central view of sign-in activity across its mail.

The business already owned a domain name at GoDaddy, and their custom-domain email was still sitting there while daily work ran on personal Gmail. Moving onto Google Workspace meant setting up business accounts, moving DNS to Cloudflare, configuring MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records without interrupting mail delivery, and bringing existing messages across. That is the kind of multi-step IT project a busy team rarely has the time or background to take on alone.

That discovery led us to build and ship a much larger capability. Marling now manages a business’s Google Workspace and domain DNS directly from the device. We also help businesses move their DNS to Cloudflare and their email into Google Workspace accounts on their own domain, while their domain registration stays at GoDaddy. Rachel is working with this first business right now to finish that move.

Once your domain and Google Workspace are set up, Marling manages the pieces your team couldn’t manage on its own. You don’t have to hunt through the Google Admin console or Cloudflare DNS screens to run your accounts. An administrator asks Marling in plain words in chat: “Add our new hire Maria Lopez,” “Jen left, lock her out,” or “Point our mail at Google.”

Because account and domain access is powerful, the device holds it under the same kind of guardrails as email sending. Only an administrator can ask for a change, and the assistant cannot execute one on its own. It prepares the change and opens a check page in Settings that shows what will change, before and after, and how to undo it. Nothing happens until you press Confirm. Your Google Workspace service account key and Cloudflare DNS token are saved on the device’s Saved logins and keys page and locked to the device’s security chip. The Cloudflare token reaches only your domain’s DNS records, and the Google key holds directory and settings permissions only, with no permission to read the contents of anyone’s mail, files, calendar, or contacts. Every confirmed change is recorded in a tamper-evident log, with an Undo option where a change can be reversed.

What one business needs can change what the next one gets

The Gmail request gave us a concrete place to start. Following it led from reading a message to preparing a reply, then into the accounts and domain that kept the business running.

We built those capabilities into Marling so the next business can benefit from the same work. That is how we intend to grow: learn where a customer’s day gets stuck, build something useful, and make it part of what we can bring to others.

Over time, we want more of the business’s work to start in that same place, with its knowledge, its tools, and a person’s approval behind the next step.

If your team has a daily bottleneck or an IT setup you want taken off your plate, tell us what you run: hello@marling.io.