Field Notes: I Gave an Agent My Inbox for a Week. It Earned a Raise, Then a Curfew

The rules were simple, and I wrote them on a sticky note so I couldn't pretend otherwise.

For the first three days, the agent could read, sort and draft, but not send. From day four, it could send replies in three categories I'd marked as low-risk: scheduling, newsletters and "thanks, got it" acknowledgements. Everything else waited for me. I'd review at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. and keep a tally.

I used an off-the-shelf email assistant connected to my work account, with the permissions it asked for and not one more. Here's what the week looked like.

The numbers

• 412 emails arrived.
• 287 were archived or filed without me opening them.
• 64 replies were drafted for my review; I sent 51 with minor edits and rewrote 13.
• 31 were sent by the agent on its own from day four onwards.
• 2 of those 31 I'd take back.

My rough estimate of time saved is about forty minutes a day, mostly in the mornings. Your inbox, and your threshold for embarrassment, will differ.

Days one to three: the intern who never sleeps

The first surprise was how good it was at the boring sorting. Newsletters went into a folder I actually read on Fridays. Receipts were labelled. Three threads I'd ignored for weeks surfaced with one-line summaries, including this one: "You promised to send a contract on 14 October. They have followed up twice."

That one stung, and it was the most useful sentence of the week.

The drafts were competent and slightly too warm. Every one of them began with "Thanks so much for reaching out!" I added a line to its instructions, "I write short, direct emails; never open with thanks unless I'm actually grateful," and the next batch read like a person who'd had coffee. The wording of the instructions mattered more than any setting.

Day four: the promotion

Once sending was switched on for low-risk categories, my inbox started to feel like a calm room. Meeting requests got proposed times from my calendar. A conference organiser got a polite "not this year." It clicked fourteen unsubscribe links on my behalf, which felt like paying someone to throw out the junk mail.

By the evening I'd stopped checking its sent folder every hour. That turned out to be the mistake.

Day five: the dentist

On Thursday the dental practice emailed to move my appointment. The agent filed it under scheduling and replied to accept the new slot: Tuesday at 10 a.m. It had checked my calendar, which was clear, because the flight I'd booked for Tuesday sat in a confirmation email rather than a calendar event.

Nothing terrible happened. I called, apologised and rebooked. But it showed me the shape of the risk. The agent was perfectly obedient to an incomplete picture of my life. It didn't know what it didn't know, and neither did I until Tuesday got close.

The second email I'd take back was a quieter mistake. A long-time source wrote me a chatty note with a scheduling question at the end. The agent saw the question and sent back two time slots and nothing else. It was technically correct and socially cold. She was gracious about it, and I was mortified.

Days six and seven: the curfew

I didn't switch it off. I gave it a curfew, with new rules:

1. No sending to anyone I've emailed more than twenty times. Relationships get a human.
2. Scheduling replies stay as drafts if the email contains anything else. If there's news as well as a question, I answer it.
3. Check for travel. It now searches my inbox for booking confirmations before accepting any time.
4. A daily receipt. Every evening it sends me a five-line summary of what it sent and why.

The receipt is the best feature of the whole experiment, and I had to ask for it.

What I'd tell a friend

An email agent is excellent at housekeeping and dangerously average at relationships. Let it sort, summarise and draft as much as you like. Let it send only where a cold, correct reply is genuinely fine. And keep reading the receipts, especially in the week you start to feel you don't need to.

I'm keeping it, on a short leash and with a curfew. The sticky note now has eleven rules on it instead of three.