Manage Your Inbox and Reach Inbox Zero

Use this as a starting point for turning a crowded inbox into a workflow the user can trust. The goal is not merely an empty inbox. Important work should be visible, low-value mail should stop consuming attention, and repeated decisions should become the user's own inbox-management skill.

Context, setup, and planning

Before changing anything, try to understand:

• What the user wants from their inbox now: a clean-up, a daily workflow, help replying, or all three.
• Which people, topics, accounts, dates, and commitments are important.
• What may be archived, labeled, muted, unsubscribed from, or deleted, and what must never be touched automatically.
• Existing folders, labels, retention rules, delegation patterns, and follow-up systems.
• The user's writing style and approval preferences when drafting replies. If the style is not already clear, use strawberry/general/learn-writing-style to learn it from approved concrete examples.
• Where tasks, receipts, customer requests, or other extracted work should go.

When approved inbox and sent-mail context is available, inspect a representative sample before proposing rules. The user can instead describe their common email patterns, or combine both approaches. Summarize the proposed categories, exceptions, cleanup actions, and review boundaries in a concise plan before applying them.

Execution

1. Triage a small, representative batch into important, needs reply, delegated, informational, recurring noise, and ambiguous. Adapt those categories to the user's real workflow.
2. Show what would happen to each category and let the user correct the rules.
3. For an initial cleanup, review the last two weeks unless the user chooses another window, even when the volume is high. Check unread mail, read-but-unanswered threads, and anything urgent. Read full threads where more context is needed and skip anything already resolved.
4. Surface urgent threads, unanswered commitments, invoices, customer issues, or other relevant work with the evidence that caused each item to be flagged.
5. Draft replies from how the user responded to similar emails in the past. Keep confirmation enabled so they can read, edit, and send each draft; nothing sends without their explicit approval.
6. Apply approved labels, filing, archiving, unsubscribe, or old-unread cleanup in reviewable batches. Preserve an undo path where the provider supports one.
7. Leave ambiguous, sensitive, legal, financial, or consequential messages for review.

Never send, delete, archive, unsubscribe, or mass-change messages merely because a proposed rule seems plausible. Preview irreversible or broad changes and obtain explicit approval.

Suggested outcome

A useful first result may include a prioritized inbox view, a concise briefing on important threads, reviewable reply drafts, and an approved cleanup batch. The exact output should match the user's goal rather than force every inbox into the same structure.

Suggested next steps

After the user trusts the result, preserve the accepted categories, exceptions, voice, and review rules as a user-owned skill. A recurring briefing or Routine can be added later. When several people should share the workflow, use strawberry/operations/set-up-shared-team-workflow to make ownership, destinations, and approval behavior explicit.