Guide
What Is Relationship Memory?
Relationship memory is the ability to preserve the unfinished state of a relationship after the message itself stops demanding attention.
Email systems remember messages extremely well. They are much worse at remembering what the messages still imply.
Someone is waiting on you. You are waiting on them. A promise was made. A timing window is narrowing. A conversation became relevant again. The thread still contains unfinished work even after it falls out of view.
What relationship memory remembers
Not everything. The useful memory is lightweight: who owns the next move, what changed, what was promised, whether the loop resolved, and whether the relationship is worth surfacing again.
Conversation history tells you what was said. Relationship memory preserves what is still unfinished.
Why Gmail alone does not solve this
Gmail is the source of truth for the messages and can suggest follow-ups through Nudges. But recency is not the same thing as consequence. Once a thread is read, archived, or buried under newer mail, the relationship state can disappear from attention while remaining unresolved in reality.
Why not store everything?
More memory is not automatically better. A useful system should retain enough state to notice a meaningful change without turning every person and message into another object to manage.
How Sidekick Log uses relationship memory
Sidekick Log keeps lightweight derived state around Gmail conversations to surface threads that may be waiting, quiet, or changed. A signal is a reason to review the conversation, not proof of another person's intent.
Finding newly relevant dormant relationships and patterns across conversations is a research direction. It should not be read as a guarantee of the current extension's coverage.