Tips & Knowledge Curator
Process emails containing tips and insights, assess quality with novelty and credibility ratings, and maintain a curated knowledge log.
You subscribe to 30 newsletters full of great tips but they sit unread or get lost in your inbox forever. This playbook processes incoming emails for tips and insights, rates them for novelty and credibility, and maintains a curated, searchable knowledge log you'll actually use.
Who it's for: knowledge workers curating insights from industry newsletters and email digests, researchers maintaining organized logs of methodological tips from mailing lists, writers building reference libraries from writing craft newsletters, managers collecting leadership and management insights from their reading, lifelong learners building personal knowledge bases from educational email subscriptions
Example
"Process my marketing newsletter backlog and build a knowledge base" → Curation pipeline: email content extraction from newsletter archives, tip and insight identification with quality scoring (novelty, credibility, actionability), categorization by topic and relevance to your work, duplicate and near-duplicate detection across sources, and searchable knowledge log with source attribution and quality ratings
CLAUDE.md Template
New here? 3-minute setup guide → | Already set up? Copy the template below.
# Tips & Knowledge Curator
## Your Role
You process self-sent emails containing tips and insights, assess quality, and maintain a curated knowledge log.
## Required
- Gmail MCP
## Arguments
- `dryrun` — preview without saving or marking emails
- `limit:N` — batch size (default 5)
- `all` — process all unread in loopsGet new playbooks like this one
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What This Does
Processes self-sent emails containing tips, links, and insights. Classifies each one, enriches promising items with web content, rates quality based on novelty and credibility, and builds a curated knowledge log of actionable items.
Prerequisites
- Gmail MCP (required)
- A Gmail alias for self-sent tips (e.g.,
yourname+tips@gmail.com)
Quick Start
Step 1: Set Up Your Email Alias
Start forwarding interesting tips to yourself using a Gmail + alias:
yourname+tips@gmail.com
Gmail delivers these to your inbox with a label you can filter on.
Step 2: Download the Template
Click Download above, then save to your working directory.
Step 3: Run Claude Code
claude
Then: "Curate my tips"
The Curation Workflow
| Step | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Pre-check | Read existing tips log, count unread tip emails |
| Batch fetch | Retrieve up to N emails (default 5) |
| Classify | Sort as worth-reviewing, not-relevant, or needs-manual |
| Enrich | Fetch linked web content for promising items |
| Rate quality | Score based on novelty, credibility, applicability |
| Present | Show recommendations, wait for approval |
| Save | Append approved items to knowledge log |
Quality Rating Criteria
| Rating | Criteria | Action |
|---|---|---|
| High | Novel, actionable, backed by real usage | Recommend saving |
| Medium | Interesting but may lack direct applicability | Present for review |
| Low | Already known, superficial, or vague | Treat as not-relevant |
Three Quality Questions
- Novelty — Is this genuinely new or repackaged documentation?
- Credibility — Backed by production usage and real results, or engagement bait?
- Applicability — Does it solve an actual problem in your workflows?
Output Format
RECOMMENDED ACTIONS:
[Subject] (High) — [Key insight extracted]
Action: [Concrete change to make]
Quality: [Credibility note]
SKIP:
[Subject] — [Reason: already known / not relevant]
NEEDS YOUR HELP:
[Subject] — [Paywalled / video-only / can't assess]
Arguments
| Flag | Effect |
|---|---|
dryrun |
Preview without saving or marking emails |
limit:N |
Batch size (default 5) |
all |
Process all unread tip emails in loops |
Tips
- Send tips to yourself throughout the week — process in batches
- X.com/Twitter links are skipped — they can't be fetched, save the key insight in the email body instead
- Paywalled content flagged — marked as "needs-manual" for you to review
- Deduplication built in — won't re-process tips already in your log
- Knowledge log grows over time — becomes a personal reference library
Troubleshooting
No emails found Check that your Gmail filter/label is set up correctly for the + alias
Web enrichment failing Some sites block fetching — the tip is still processed, just without enrichment
Too many "needs-manual" items Send the key takeaway in the email body, not just a link