Hello,
If you run or work in a business you get far too much email, and I’d bet you’ve never counted where it comes from. You deal with it one at a time so you never see that most of it was never yours.
I had mine counted this morning. Three months was about 6,100 messages, three quarters of it didn’t need me. Took about twenty minutes and I didn’t open a single one. Here’s how.
Connect your mailbox
Claude and ChatGPT both plug into Outlook and Gmail now. In Claude it’s under connectors, in ChatGPT it’s under connected apps, and either way it’s a couple of clicks and a login. Once that’s done it can read your email the way you would, and count the way you never would.
Then ask it these, one at a time.
“Go through the last three months of my inbox and tell me who the top thirty senders are, how many each sent, and split them into automated, marketing, group threads, and actual people who needed something from me.”
Mine came back at 360 a week. 89 real people and suppliers, 67 internal, 50 from a group I sit on, 41 automated, 38 marketing, 28 support tickets.
“Look at my sent items for the same period. How many are forwards with nothing written in them, and who did I forward to most?”
I had 225. Invoices, price files, supplier deals landing on me and going straight to whoever should have had them. One email to each sender saying send these to so and so from now on, and that’s gone for good.
“Which emails am I getting that look like they’re meant for someone else or a role that’s changed?”
This is the one you’d never find yourself. Mine turned up payment notifications that should go to accounts, a mailbox from a job that no longer exists still forwarding to me, a daily digest I’d never read, and 96 replies to a customer mailer that came to me because nobody set the reply-to. About 40 a week gone before 11am.
“Which newsletters and marketing senders should I unsubscribe from, ranked by volume?”
I’d have named three. It showed me eight.
“Set up rules to move automated mail, marketing and ticket updates into folders I’ll check once a day.”
It’ll do this for you in Outlook or Gmail if you let it, or hand you the list and you do it in five minutes.
Mine goes from 66 a day to about 30. Call it an hour a day back, for twenty minutes of asking. And it spotted the thing I’m most embarrassed about, which was 120 replies in three months that just said thanks.
Reply and tell me your worst sender. I’d put money on a system notification you’ve never once acted on.
Andrew
Ps. the first thing I did with the hour back was check my email.