A 6-week, 8,400-email field test of running a privacy-respecting local-LLM email triage layer on Apple Silicon — Apple Mail → AppleScript → Ollama-served Mistral 7B or Llama 3.1 8B — with a 4-bucket rubric, real hardware benchmarks, and a 92% accuracy figure you can reproduce.
Self-hosting a 70B model sounds reckless for a marketing team. For 90% of teams it is. But there are 4 specific jobs — bulk ticket classification, private competitive intel, overnight SEO meta-generation, PII-redacted list cleaning — where the math flips and a single A100 + Ollama pays for itself in 4-7 months. Hardware reality, Docker compose, real throughput, and the 4 prompts.
A practical guide to setting up SmolLM 1.7B on your laptop with Ollama and using it to rewrite marketing content — zero API costs, full privacy, and surprisingly good quality for everyday copy work.
