Streak

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Build me a CRM inside my inbox that replaces Streak — and know why this is ALMOST.

The idea is **pipelines drawn over the inbox itself**: a thread is a deal, and the stages sit above your mail rather than in another application. Reproducing it means a browser extension injected into a mail interface that changes without warning, and that maintenance is the recurring cost. The mail sync is the valuable half and it is buildable; the injection is the fragile half.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode, with FTS5
- A browser extension, Manifest V3, injecting the pipeline view
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- pipelines: id, name, stages_json, fields_json
- boxes: id, pipeline_id, stage, title, value_cents, currency, owner_id, notes_md, custom_json, created_at, closed_at, outcome — a box is the deal, and it is attached to threads rather than replacing them
- box_threads: box_id, thread_id, external_id, linked_at, is_primary
- stage_history: id, box_id, from_stage, to_stage, at, actor_id — append-only, and where every honest number comes from
- contacts: id, email, name, company, last_contacted_at
- messages: id, thread_id, message_id, direction, from_address, to_json, subject, snippet, occurred_at — mirrored, never the body
- tasks, reminders, snippets — the small features that get used constantly
- The thread identifier from the mail provider is the join. It is stable, and matching on subject would not be

THE MAIL SIDE, WHICH IS THE VALUABLE HALF
- Read-only sync over the provider's API, incremental with a cursor, idempotent by message id
- Store the address, direction, subject, timestamp and a short snippet. Never the body. Say so in the README — that restraint is what makes somebody willing to connect their work mailbox
- A box's last activity, response time and days quiet all derive from these rows, so nobody ever updates a record
- Attaching a thread to a box is one action, and afterwards everything in that thread follows automatically
- When a message could belong to two open boxes, file it against the contact and ask. Never guess, because a message on the wrong deal is worse than one on none

THE EXTENSION, WHICH IS THE FRAGILE HALF
- A sidebar on an open thread showing its box, the stage, the value, the notes and the tasks — and a control to change the stage without leaving the message
- A pipeline view: the boxes as a board, reachable from inside the mail interface
- Write it as one small adapter with a saved page fixture and a test. The host interface will change, and a failing test is better than a mystery
- Per-host permission, a token to your own server, and nothing sent anywhere else
- Say in the README that maintaining this is the ongoing cost of the whole approach

THE SMALL FEATURES THAT MAKE IT USED
- **Snippets**: canned replies inserted with a shortcut and variable substitution. Used more than anything else in the product
- **Send later**: a message scheduled from the extension and sent by a worker through the provider, once, idempotently
- **Follow-up reminders**: remind me if nobody replies to this thread in four days, computed from the mirrored messages rather than from a timer
- **Thread splitting and merging**, because a long conversation eventually contains two subjects
- Mail merge is where this category gets people into trouble. If you build it, cap the volume hard, require a stop-on-reply, and put a one-click unsubscribe in every message

REPORTING
- Conversion between stages and time in each stage, from stage_history
- Boxes with no activity for longer than a threshold, ranked — that list is the actual pipeline problem
- Required outcome and reason on a closed box, because losing without a recorded reason teaches nothing
- Everything computed at query time

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, BASE_URL, SESSION_SECRET, ENCRYPTION_KEY, HASH_SALT, provider credentials
- Migrations on boot, each once; credentials encrypted at rest
- Nightly backup off the machine, restore script
- Health endpoint reporting mail sync age

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Thread-level linking and stage history. The first is what keeps the record current with no effort; the second is the only thing that will ever tell you something you did not already know.