1
2 Comments

Show IH: Sentry - AI Email Shield that saves me 69 hours/year (Pre-inbox filtering)

Hey Indie Hackers! πŸ‘‹

Alexey here. Like many of you, I have a "public" email for my SaaS. And like many of you, my morning routine used to start with 20 minutes of deleting:

  • "Quick question..." (Sales pitch)
  • "Partnership opportunity..." (Link exchange)
  • "URGENT INVOICE" (Phishing)

I calculated I was spending ~70 hours a year just triaging spam. That's two weeks of dev time lost. Existing filters (Gmail, Outlook) work after the email hits my inbox. I wanted something that stops it before.

So I built Sentry.

πŸš€ What is it? Sentry is an AI-powered proxy layer for your email. It sits in front of your real inbox (Gmail/Outlook) and filters incoming traffic using LLMs (Gemini 2.0) trained on B2B spam patterns.

πŸ› οΈ How it works (Technical):

  1. MX Layer: Point your MX records to Sentry (or use our aliases).
  2. AI Analysis: We analyze sender headers, SPF/DKIM, and body content.
  3. Routing:
  • Clean: Forwarded to your real inbox via SMTP.
  • Spam: Rejected instantly.
  • Suspicious: Quarantined for manual review (via a dashboard).

πŸ’° Results so far:

  • My inbox volume dropped by 80%.
  • Phishing attempts (fake invoices/CEOs) are blocked before I see them.
  • I saved ~1.5 hours last week alone.

πŸ™I need your feedback: We just launched the Beta. It's free for early users. I'm looking for founders who are drowning in cold outreach to stress-test our AI model.

Does the setup flow make sense?
Would you trust a proxy with your business email? (We don't store bodies, only metadata, but trust is key).

What features are missing?
Check it out: https://sentry.wr.io/

Let me know what you think! I'm hanging out in the comments all day. πŸ‘‡

on February 9, 2026
  1. 1

    Nice to see this live! We chatted about the earlier version β€” the rebrand to "Sentry" is a good move for B2B positioning.

    A few observations on the launch:

    What's working:

    • The "pre-inbox" framing is smart β€” positions it as infrastructure, not just another spam filter
    • MX layer approach means it works regardless of email client
    • Quarantine dashboard for manual review solves the false positive anxiety

    Questions for the beta:

    1. What's the cold start experience? New users have no training data β€” how quickly does the AI adapt to their specific spam patterns?
    2. How are you handling legitimate cold outreach? Some founders actually want investor/partnership emails to get through
    3. For the "suspicious" bucket β€” what's the typical volume? If it's too high, manual review becomes its own time sink

    The 69 hours/year number is compelling β€” that's a very concrete ROI. Would love to see a breakdown of how that's calculated (messages blocked Γ— avg time per message?).