The problem

You open your inbox and there are 60 emails. Most need a reply. Most of those replies are things you’ve written a hundred times before. So you spend the first ninety minutes of your day doing the least valuable work you do all week — and the important one is buried on page two.

What I install

An agent that lives in your inbox and works before you get there.

Every morning it has already:

• Read every new email

• Sorted them — customer, lead, supplier, admin, junk

• Written a ready-to-send draft reply for each one, in your writing voice

• Pulled the genuinely urgent ones to the top, and told you why

You open your inbox. The work is done. You read, adjust a line if you want, and send.

What you need

• A Gmail or Outlook account you can connect

• 10 minutes to fill in one form

• No software to buy, no code to write, nothing to maintain

What it costs to run — about $15–40/month

Your agent runs in your own accounts, set up in your name, on your card:

• The AI itself (Anthropic), charged on what you actually use — usually $10–30/month for an inbox

• A small always-on server so it can work before you wake up — about $5–10/month

None of that is paid to me, and there’s no software subscription or per-seat fee. You see exactly what you’re spending, you can turn it off any time, and nobody can raise the price on you or hold your data hostage.