Mailmint

MailMint turns incoming emails into actionable business intelligence—classifying finance & product offers, benchmarking prices with AI, and flagging fraud, all inside your existing inbox workflow.

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📬 Inspiration

Every day, businesses receive hundreds of emails—most of them ignored, lost in spam, or overlooked due to volume. We asked a simple question: "What if every email could become a business decision trigger?"

MailMint was born from that thought—turning emails into actionable intelligence using AI. Whether it's a vendor quote, product offer, or a spoofed phishing attempt, MailMint makes sure you never miss the insights buried in your inbox.

🛠️ How We Built It

We started by integrating Postmark as the inbound email processor and built a webhook system to stream all incoming messages into our backend.

Using Hono.js on Google Cloud Run (GCR) and Docker, we built a scalable API layer with strict Firebase authentication. We designed a flexible schema using MongoDB and Mongoose to store emails, documents, and verifications.

Then came the magic—MailMint’s Upstash-powered background workflow asynchronously triggered a multi-step process:

  1. Email Classification
  2. Product & Price Extraction
  3. Perplexity AI Integration for benchmarking
  4. Header-level Spoof Checks
  5. Final Risk Score & Recommendations

🚧 Challenges We Faced

  • Designing a pipeline that processes heavy emails while staying performant under Cloud Run's request limits.
  • Creating an idempotent Postmark webhook that avoids double inserts.
  • Parsing attachments and HTML emails reliably across formats.
  • Ensuring spoof detection (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) was precise and didn't flag valid senders.
  • Keeping API response fast while delegating heavy logic to background queues.

💡 What We Learned

  • How to build asynchronous verification pipelines with fast API responses.
  • Leveraging Perplexity AI as a real-time business intelligence engine.
  • The power of mixing cloud-native tools like GCS, Upstash, and Docker to move fast with confidence.
  • Why even basic email headers can hold critical trust signals.

📦 Built With

  • perplexity
  • mongoose
  • mongodb
  • postmark
  • gcr
  • google-cloud-run
  • docker
  • hono-js

🚀 Try It Out

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