Can AI Fix Your Chaotic Inbox? I Unleashed It On 200,000 Unread Emails

It happens almost without you realizing it. It’s insidious, the accumulation of unwanted, unread emails in overwhelming amounts. Like locusts, they descend daily en masse, flooding the compartmentalized chambers of Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook with promises of savings and harbingers of critical news.

Tragically, many go unread, and even more are tragically, utterly useless. As of this article, my Gmail was sporting a count of 52,299 emails in my main inbox and 93,717 in my Promotions inbox. In total, I had more than 192,000 emails mocking me from the inside.

This sounds like a job for someone (or something) who won’t become enraged by reading thousands of sob story subject lines from Nextdoor and hundreds of alerts informing them that they did not win the lottery. 

Here’s how I used Google’s Gemini AI to try to get a handle on my chaotic email inbox. 

Connect and crawl

In order to avoid scanning through the glut of subject lines for something of value, I gave Gemini access to look through my Gmail account. All I had to do was ask, and Gemini served up a direct toggle in our chat for me to connect it.

Gemini/Screenshot by CNET

Alternatively, typing in “@Gmail” into the Gemini chat will pull up the option to connect your account as well. 

Ejecting repeat offenders

The way Gemini generally handled helping me clear and clean out unwanted email threads from my inbox was by crafting custom search queries that would root out the weeds. The first kind of email I tried to purge from my inbox was the daily alert I get via my neighborhood’s Nextdoor community about some sad thing happening with an animal. 

After a quick back and forth in the chat, it offered a prompt:

from:nextdoor.com (animal abuse OR animal cruelty OR coyote OR dead animal OR “lost dog” OR “lost cat”)

I plopped that sucker into Gmail’s search bar, and it quickly surfaced every icky Nextdoor post about a dead coyote or abandoned kitten so I could delete them all together.

Gemini/Screenshot by CNET

Reading so you don’t have to

Sorting out which e-commerce sites, government agencies and recurring services are abusing my inbox by stuffing it full of worthless sale announcements and thinly veiled threats around repaying my student loans? Ain’t nobody got time for that. 

In a quick chat session, Gemini was able to parse through the Gmail inbox and gave me a roundup of the senders who show up most often and which of their messages were the most frivolous so I could easily eliminate them.

Archiving the alerts

Some things you want to keep around just in case, like old invoices and email exchanges you might need for emotional blackmail. Google Gemini was able to help me craft a search query that sorted the threads I wanted to keep for later from the stuff that was useless. 

One of the tips Gemini outlined for me was around keeping promotions from sneaking into this lot by using quotations around keywords, an old-school Google search trick that applies to Gmail as well. 

Gemini was also able to scan through my inbox and look for promotional emails that contained words like “statement,” as in “statement armchairs” rather than “bank statement,” and provide me with a prompt crafted to target only the exact emails I actually wanted to archive.

Here’s an example of the search prompt Gemini gave that banished an email on buy one, get one deals from Benihana and a promo on statement armchairs from Wayfair:

subject:(invoice OR receipt OR payment OR statement OR bill) -shop -sale -off -deal -furniture

How useful overall is AI at clearing your inbox?

Google’s Gemini AI tool was great at helping me sort through emails and isolate keywords and prompts, but the tool is not currently capable of deleting, archiving or creating custom folders in Gmail since it’s not an AI agent. You have to do that part yourself, but I honestly think that’s a good thing.

What it does well is cut down on the time and effort a person looking to organize their inbox might spend coming up with keywords and search-and-destroy methods. Gemini significantly cut down the mental load for me and saved me time, but the power to execute stayed safely in my hands. 

Rachel Kane

Contributor and former Senior Editor

Rachel is a freelancer based in Echo Park, Los Angeles and has been writing and producing content for nearly two decades on subjects ranging from tech to fashion, health and lifestyle to entertainment and education. She’s currently a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, helping to mold the new minds who will inherit the media landscape. She’s hoping to prevent the singularity by being polite to chatbots and spends way too much time refining Midjourney prompts.

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