The replies you are still waiting for

The most useful list in my working week is one I never wrote. It is every email where I had the last word and nobody answered.

A proposal sent on a Tuesday. A "lovely to meet you, shall we get a coffee?" after a conference. An invoice. None of them are tasks, exactly. Nobody put them in a todo app. They just sit in the Sent folder, getting older, until someone remembers. Usually not me.

NexxusCRM calls this list Awaiting Reply. Here is how it decides what goes on it, and the evening it showed me 1,700 threads.

The rule is one line

For each email conversation, the app looks at the newest message. If it is from you, the thread is waiting on a reply. If it is from them, it is not.

That is all. No AI guessing whether your email "needed" an answer, no scoring. You sent the last message; the ball is in their court; it goes on the list. When they reply, it comes off at the next sync.

Two details make the rule work in practice.

It reads your Sent folder. The app syncs your inbox and your Sent folder over IMAP, straight from your Mac to your mail provider. So a reply you send from your phone, or from Apple Mail, counts as soon as it lands in Sent. You do not have to send everything from the app for the list to be right.

It follows the thread, not the subject. Conversations are stitched together from the headers mail clients already write (In-Reply-To and References, or Gmail's own thread ID). The subject line is never used. So two unrelated emails both called "Quick question" stay separate, and a reply where someone changed the subject stays in the right place.

Only people you care about

A thread only counts if it is with someone in your CRM. Your contacts, not your whole inbox.

This is the bit that keeps the list readable. Your Sent folder is full of things that will never get a reply and should not: a message to a support desk, a form you filled in, an "unsubscribe me". None of those are relationships. If you have not added the person, the app does not chase them for you.

The 1,700 threads

The first time I pointed it at my real inbox, Awaiting Reply had about 1,700 threads in it. The oldest was from 2012.

All of them were technically correct. I did send the last message in each one, and nobody did answer. But a list that long is not a list, it is an archaeological site. Nobody is following up on a 2012 email about a meeting room.

So there is a cutoff. Settings has a card called Awaiting reply, with one choice: "Stop chasing after". It defaults to 90 days, and you can pick anything from a week to a year. A thread you ended drops off once it has gone that long with no answer.

Nothing is deleted. Widen the cutoff and the older threads come back. It is a view, not a purge, which matters when the thing you are being asked to give up is your own email.

If you connect a real inbox for the first time, expect the number to be bigger than you would like. That is the app working. Set the cutoff to something you would honestly chase, and dismiss the rest.

What you do with it

The list sits in the sidebar, and the count is one of the four numbers at the top of the morning dashboard, next to meetings, followups due and people going cold.

Open a thread and you can:

• reply from the app. It goes out over your own mail provider's SMTP, threaded properly, so it lands in the same conversation on their side;
• turn it into a reminder. One button makes a task called "Follow up: " and the subject, so the chase has a date on it;
• open it in Mail, if that is where you would rather write;
• dismiss it. Some threads are finished even if they look unfinished. Dismissed threads stay off the list unless the conversation starts again.

Each contact's page also shows their open threads, with how long each has waited. So when you are looking at Priya before a call, you can see that the proposal went out nine days ago and she has not mentioned it.

What it does not do (yet)

It matches on the address the account is set up with. If you send from an alias, the app does not yet know that was you. That is on the list.

It also does not try to read your email to judge whether an answer was expected. A "thanks!" that ends a conversation will sit there until you dismiss it. I would rather dismiss a few than trust a model to decide which of my emails mattered.

Why bother

Most of my missed opportunities were not dramatic. Nobody said no. The conversation just stopped, at my end or theirs, and neither of us noticed for three months.

A list of threads where the ball is in their court is the cheapest way I know to notice sooner. One glance on a Monday, two nudges, and the coffee actually happens.

If you want the list

The first fifty people get NexxusCRM now. They shape what gets built next, and whatever it costs at launch, they never pay more than that.

If your followups live in your Sent folder and your memory, ask for a seat.