Get Claude to manage your inbox

The two pieces

1. A connection to your email. So Claude can read your inbox, draft replies and file things.
2. Your rules, as a skill. A skill is a set of instructions Claude follows every time it does a job. Yours tells it how you want your email sorted.

The steps

This is the reel, written down.

1. Connect your email

   In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors and add your email. Gmail has the best connection, with the most Claude can do: read, search, draft and label.

   On Outlook? The Microsoft 365 connector needs a work account, and your admin has to switch on write access before Claude can draft or file anything.

2. Give it your rules as a skill

   Mine splits every email into four piles:

   1. Needs my attention: a reply gets drafted straight away, ready for me to check and send.
   2. Important, but no reply needed: stays in the inbox for me to read.
   3. Reviews: saved into their own folder.
   4. Noise: newsletters, marketing and notifications. In my inbox these get deleted straight away.

   The skill below does exactly this. Download it, then follow the next step to add it.

   Download the inbox skill (.zip)

3. Add the skill to Claude

   First check Settings → Capabilities and make sure code execution is on, or skills won't run. Then go to Customize → Skills, click +, then Create skill → Upload a skill, and choose the zip.

4. Make it yours

   Open the skill and fill in the “About me” block at the top: your name, your business, how you write, and anything a reply should never promise. In Gmail, create four labels with these exact names: Needs me, Reviews, Keep and Noise.

5. Run it

   In any chat, type:

   Run it nowCopy

   Triage my inbox using the inbox-triage skill.

   To have it done before you're up every day, make it a scheduled task (Day 16 shows how) with that same line, every weekday at 7am.

Two safety rules built in

1. It never sends anything. Every reply is a draft. You read it, tweak it and press send.
2. It labels noise instead of deleting it. The download files noise under Noise so you can bin the lot in one click. Once you've watched it sort correctly for a couple of weeks, you can change that rule to delete.

Anything the skill isn't sure about goes in Keep, never in Noise. Better a newsletter in front of you than a client email in the bin.

The result

At the end of the day your inbox is clean. Anything that needs a reply already has one drafted, everything else is in the right folder, and the only emails left in front of you are the ones you actually need to read.

What you need

1. A Claude account with code execution switched on. Scheduling it needs a paid plan.
2. Gmail (or Outlook through Microsoft 365, with your admin's go-ahead).

Where this goes

Before you hand more jobs to Claude, Day 19 is the order I work in with every client, and why AI comes last.