What is waiting

gmail_followups does one small arithmetic job. It takes the threads Gmail returns for a query, looks at the last message in each — the last one that is not a draft, when a half-written reply sits at the end — and asks two questions: does that message carry the SENT label, and how many whole days ago did it arrive. If the user spoke last, the thread is awaiting-them. If somebody else spoke last and it is still in the inbox, it is awaiting-me. Nothing reads the text. Nothing decides whether a reply was wanted. That narrowness is deliberate — a follow-up list that invents obligations is worse than no list — and it is the whole reason this skill needs writing down, because the output reads like a list of people who are ignoring the user and it is not one.

The failure that matters most is the most natural one. A row says the user wrote to Sam six days ago and Sam has not replied. Sam replied on a call on Tuesday, and the thing was settled. Send a nudge off the back of that row and the user has told a colleague they were not listening. The mailbox has no way to know about the call; it will show that thread as waiting until somebody writes into it, which may be never.