Inspiration Our project iSpy was inspired by the struggles both recruiters and candidates face with email. Recruiters spend too much time digging through long emails and resumes, while candidates remain unsure if their message was ever read. On top of that, bots and security scanners inflate “open” signals, creating noise instead of clarity. We wanted to fix this by turning email into a feedback loop, reliable read receipts and instant summaries without changing existing workflows.
What it does iSpy adds a lightweight intelligence layer on top of the email you already use. It provides: Bot-filtered, human-verified read receipts. 2–3 line AI summaries of long emails or resumes for instant triage. Privacy-first design with minimal metadata stored and optional no-retention summary generation.
How we built it Frontend: CSS, HTML, JS, React + TypeScript with Tailwind. Backend: PostgreSOL, Node.js with SMTP passthrough to integrate seamlessly with existing email. Open signal: Each outgoing email includes a signed, privacy-aware token. Classifier: Scores events as human vs. bot using heuristics like timing, cache behavior, and user-agent details. AI Summaries: Generated and compressed into 2–3 lines, and capable of running statelessly or on-device.
Challenges we ran into The biggest challenges were filtering out false opens from bots and fine-tuning the AI so it consistently produced short, useful summaries instead of verbose paragraphs. Accomplishments that we're proud of Built a fully working dashboard that flips to “Read” when a human opens an email. Designed a privacy-aware open signal that minimizes metadata. Achieved consistently short summaries (2–3 lines) instead of bloated text.
What we learned We learned that signal quality is everything, tracking is meaningless without bot filtering. We also realized that recruiters prefer brevity over detail, and that privacy-first design is not just ethical, it’s a competitive advantage.
What’s next for iSpy We plan to make the AI smarter so it generates even sharper and more context-aware summaries, adapting to different types of emails and resumes. Alongside that, we aim to optimize our protocols for speed, ensuring that read signals and summaries appear instantly in the dashboard without lag. These improvements will make iSpy feel seamless, faster, and more intelligent, helping recruiters act on information in real time and giving candidates an even smoother experience.
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