I have three inboxes: my personal Gmail, the SNVORA account, and the one for the Rivian club I run. For a long time, the first thing I did every morning and the last thing I did most nights was check all three to see what actually needed my attention. Most of it did not. But you cannot know that until you look, and checking three inboxes twice a day becomes its own small job.
So I handed the looking to the team.
What it does
Twice a day, at 6:30 in the morning and 6:30 at night, a job checks all three inboxes. It sorts everything into four groups: needs a real reply, needs a reply and is time-sensitive, worth knowing about but no reply needed, and junk it doesn’t even list. For emails that need a reply, it writes one in my voice and leaves it in the drafts folder for me to review.
By the time I get up, the scanning is done. What is waiting for me is a short briefing of what came in and a handful of drafts I can send, edit, or throw away. What used to be a job is now something I review in a few minutes with my morning chai.
The drafting step uses my real writing rules before it starts, so the drafts do not sound like a help desk. They sound like something I would have written, which is why the drafts are worth keeping instead of rewriting from scratch.
The hard part is not writing. It is not writing twice.
Anyone can use a language model to generate replies for an inbox. The real problem appears on the second run. The 6:30 PM job sees the same email the 6:30 AM job already drafted a reply to. A basic system would draft it again. Now you have two drafts for one email, then four by the next morning, and by the end of the week, your drafts folder is full of clutter, and you stop trusting it.
So before writing anything, the system runs three checks. It looks at what I have sent in the last couple of days, what drafts already exist, and its own log of every email it has processed. Only emails that pass all three checks get a new draft. It even standardizes subject lines, so “Re: Fwd: Recovery kits” and “recovery kits” are seen as the same conversation, not two different ones.
The value is not just that it can write a reply, but that it never makes me sort through its own duplicates.
The send button is still mine
This is the design choice I care about most, even though it is a small one.
The system can read my email and write drafts, but it cannot send them. Not just because I told it not to, but because by design, I never gave it access or a method to. So even if a future version tried to send a reply on its own, it couldn’t.
A rule you have to remember is one you will eventually forget.
The launcher around it works the same way. On a normal run, it finishes quietly and logs a simple “done.” When something breaks and it cannot recover, it does the opposite and alerts me loudly, so I notice the failure instead of it getting lost in a log. That is the behavior you want from anything running while you sleep.
The numbers, and the number I will not give you
Between April 5 and September 8, the system processed 9,956 emails across the three inboxes over 225 runs. It flagged 220 as needing a reply and wrote 155 drafts. The difference between 220 and 155 shows the deduplication working: the rest were emails I had already answered or ones that already had a draft.
I can’t tell you how many hours this has saved me, and I’m not going to guess. I haven’t measured it. I still read the briefing and review the drafts, and that is real time nobody has counted.
What I can say plainly is that three inboxes get read twice a day whether I am busy or not, nothing that needs a reply falls through, and a draft in my voice is waiting when I sit down. That is worth a lot to a guy running a business with a newborn on the way.
A recent, honest surprise
The other day I received a dashboard alert in the morning that the email audit hadn’t run. I had seen a customer email come in the night before that I had manually checked right before falling asleep, so I expected a draft response to have been created. Instead of digging into the alert, I just assumed a draft hadn’t been made and took to writing my own reply. This was for my business and a potential new client, so I took time to draft a thorough, thoughtful response. It probably took me 15-20 minutes as I wordsmithed and tweaked until I was confident the email was clear, but personal and covered potential asks the customer might have. I quickly sent the email off and settled into my morning routine. About an hour later, I started to dig into the dashboard error to see what had happened. It turns out it was a false positive, and the morning email audit had run. Sure enough, the draft of this email was in my Drafts folder ready for me to review and send. I read the draft. It was shorter, more thorough, and more personal than the one I had spent a chunk of my morning writing from scratch. All that to say, my copywriter did a great job nailing my voice from the training content I provided, and I was a bit humbled by the work the team did.
I haven’t hired an admin
One pleasant surprise about my email audit system is something I didn’t intentionally design. Having my inbox scanned, prioritized, and emails requiring attention automatically drafted is extremely valuable and a time saver. I also didn’t expect to get an “executive admin.” As part of my twice-daily summary, I receive a “Notes” section. Think of it like an expert executive assistant who knows your calendar, your tastes, your family, your business, etc. My Notes mention emails and people waiting on me. They call out potential business leads, or first-time customers, or patterns that I may not have noticed. It truly reads like I have a full-time, contextually aware admin briefing me at the beginning and end of each day.
What this is really about
The point isn’t the email triage bot itself. It is about how one person can handle more than one person’s workload.
I did not hire an assistant to watch my inboxes. I built a system that watches, drafts the routine emails, and leaves the decisions to me. It runs on a machine in my house, costs almost nothing, and does the same boring job the same careful way at 6:30 every morning and night, forever, without getting tired.
That is how the whole operation works, not just the email. Let the machine handle the reading, sorting, and first draft. Keep the judgment and the send button for yourself.
If you want to see what else the team runs day to day, check the Inside page.