Read This If Your Inbox Is Out of Control
I ended last week’s newsletter with the fact that I came back from sabbatical to 300 emails.
That’s not even the worst part. Here’s the worst part…
The Sunday* before I had my first day back, I asked Claude to analyze all the emails that came into my inbox during my entire sabbatical (31 days). I was just curious to get a “view of the forest, not the trees” as I looked at things with a fresh set of eyes.
*I had too much email-anxiety to wait until Monday and I had access to Claude Fable through Sunday
Claude told me, out of about 300 emails, I had:
100 newsletters (~45 from 2 authors alone)
85 notifications from Gusto, Intuit, Zoom, Stripe, etc
60 cold outreach
16 LinkedIn alerts (I swear I turned all those off)
20 out-of-offices from newsletter subscribers (happy about this one)
6 receipts for monthly charges
10 CCed emails from my contract bookkeeper
9 emails from my clients
9 emails.
9 emails out of 300 that actually mattered and I needed to do something about. I had no idea this was what my inbox turned into. I don’t notice the 291 emails of noise on a daily basis.
So, slightly disgusted at myself, Claude and I went to work. We…
Filtered or unsubscribed to the notifications
Unsubscribed to a few newsletters (I genuinely like most of them)
Figured out the one thing in LinkedIn I hadn’t turned off
Answered my clients
Scanned the rest for people I knew
Then, I marked the rest as “Read” (without actually reading them) and moved on with my life.
The whole process took about an hour and my email system is better for it. I’m also ruthlessly unsubscribing to cold outreach and notifications I don’t need now vs just deleting them.
So, I’m passing along the swipeable prompt for you to do this too. Block an hour on your calendar and improve your email for months.
How To Use This Prompt:
Before you paste this in, one thing: your AI needs to actually be connected to your email for this to work. That means Claude with the Gmail or Outlook connector turned on, Copilot inside Microsoft 365, Gemini in Google Workspace, that kind of thing. A regular chatbot with no access to your inbox will happily invent an analysis that looks real and is completely made up. (I built a line into the prompt that tells it to fess up if it can't actually see your inbox. Trust that over a suspiciously tidy report.)
A few things to know going in:
It only reads the boring stuff. Senders, subject lines, dates, counts. It's not sending your email anywhere or reading your actual messages for content. It's counting, not snooping.
The big numbers are estimates. When it says you got 100 newsletters, read that as "about 100." Hand-tallying a month of email is fuzzy on the big piles and exact on the small ones. Don't email me that the math is off by three. (I know. It's fine.)
It ends by offering to actually fix things. Depending on your tool, it can create labels, set up filters, and tee up unsubscribes for you. Say yes. That's where the real magic is.
Also…I built and tested this prompt on Claude with Google Workspace, running on the Fable model. Your results will vary depending on your AI platform, your model, and which connectors you've got hooked up. The prompt is written to work anywhere, but I've only put it through its paces in one setup.
Okay. Here's the prompt. Paste it in, and go make yourself a coffee while it works. It could take up to 10 minutes.
The Prompt (ready to copy/paste)
I want you to analyze the last 30 days of my email inbox and give me a report on what's actually landing there, followed by specific recommendations to make it cleaner going forward.
FIRST — before you do anything else: confirm you can actually access my inbox (Gmail or Outlook). If you cannot, stop and tell me plainly that you don't have access, rather than generating an example or estimated analysis. I want real data or none at all.
Only read metadata: sender, subject line, date, and labels/folders. You do not need to open message bodies. Don't send my data anywhere.
Analyze the last 30 days and give me:
1. TOTAL VOLUME
- Total emails received in the last 30 days
- The single biggest sender, and how many they sent
- How many senders account for roughly half my total volume
(the concentration stat)
2. THE BREAKDOWN BY TYPE — with a count for each:
- Newsletters I subscribed to
- Promotional / marketing I didn't really opt into
- Cold outreach / sales pitches (especially repeat offenders
who emailed multiple times)
- Automated notifications (software, banking, payroll, systems)
- Receipts and invoices
- Real emails from actual people (clients, colleagues, team)
- Social media notifications
Anything left over should go in an "other" bucket so the counts add up to the total.
3. PATTERNS
- What days and times most of my email arrives
- Any sender who emails me far more than I'd expect
4. THE NOISE NUMBER
- What percentage of my inbox required nothing from me
(newsletters + promo + automated + receipts + social)
- Roughly how many emails actually needed a human response
- A couple of the most absurd or over-the-top junk subject
lines, quoted, for entertainment value
Note that the large category counts are estimates, not exact.
THEN — give me specific, prioritized recommendations to improve my inbox, ordered by impact. For each one, tell me exactly what to do:
- Which senders to route out of my inbox with a filter/rule
(and what label/folder to send them to)
- Which recurring senders send BOTH a useful editorial email and a promotional one, so I can unsubscribe from the promo and keep the signal
- Which senders to unsubscribe from entirely
- Which repeat cold-outreach senders to block outright
- Any labels or folders worth creating
Finally: offer to actually set up whatever you're able to on my
behalf — creating labels/folders, building filters or rules, and
teeing up unsubscribes. Walk me through what you're about to create before you finalize any of it, and don't unsubscribe, block, or delete anything without showing me the list first.
Let me know what you learn…
Godspeed,
Erica
Save the Date
❓Q&A with Erica: Sabbatical, Ask Me Anything
Thursday, Aug 6th
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Free, sponsored by…no one. Just me.
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