For about fifteen years my email "system" was: read a message, decide it was handled, and then leave it exactly where it was. I never archived anything. So my inbox quietly grew to 15,000+ messages, of which a grand total of twelve were unread. Every day I'd glance at whatever was new that morning and ignore the wall of history behind it. It worked, technically. It also felt like living in a room where nothing ever gets put away.

I'd been meaning to fix it forever. What finally did it was realizing I didn't have to do it by hand. A little command-line tool for Google Workspace had been rattling around my head ever since I stumbled onto Justin Poehnelt's post on rewriting CLIs for AI agents during some research for work. He built the thing to be driven by an AI in the first place, and it shows. I'd braced for a painful login-and-permissions ordeal to connect it to my personal Google account; it turned out to be basically one command. So I pointed Claude at it and, instead of clicking through thousands of emails, just asked questions: how big is this really? who emails me most? what are all these old labels?

The surprises were the fun part.

The first: my "unread" was secretly doing three jobs at once. It meant new, and I still need to deal with this, and I want to read this later, all at the same time. No wonder it never felt clean. Once I split those into separate places (using a Gmail setting called Multiple Inboxes I never knew existed until that afternoon), the whole thing calmed down. (There's a nice step-by-step walkthrough if you want to set one up yourself.)

Roughly how it looks now: only what's actionable stays in the inbox, things I owe a reply sit in "Follow up," and newsletters pile up in "To Read."

The second one I did not see coming. I went in expecting to find heaps of newsletter junk to unsubscribe from. There basically wasn't any. When I actually looked, the "spam-looking" senders were things like a job offer, a note from a recruiter, an apartment contract. My inbox was never clutter. It was an unindexed archive of pretty much everything that had ever happened to me, and I'd simply never asked it what was inside.

There was even something oddly sentimental in it. My old folder labels turned out to read like a timeline of my life: university, a year abroad, a startup that didn't make it, a job that led to another. I hadn't set out to keep a diary. It just accumulated.

By the end of the afternoon the whole pile was archived (not deleted, just put away and still searchable), the dead weight was gone, and new mail now sorts itself: newsletters wait in a "read later" pile, receipts file themselves out of sight, and only genuinely new things land in front of me. The one habit I kept is embarrassingly simple: when I'm done with something, I put it away.

It's a small thing. But my inbox finally feels like mine again, and I mostly just chatted with a computer to get there. 🤖