GmailWhat they did
Dubowsky had counted 46 Gmail opens in one September day for 33 emails, two of which needed him. He connected Gmail to Claude through its connectors and set the send, reply, forward and both trash tools to Blocked rather than Needs approval, after finding that approval only holds in manual mode. He then made two daily scheduled tasks, at 7:40 and 4:10, which run on Anthropic's servers with his laptop closed. Each run reads the last 12 hours of mail and lists only three kinds: a real person writing, a question waiting on him, or a date in the next week, plus anything from a few named people, with the sender and the line it came from. Sign-in codes and reset links are reported by sender and subject only. On Sundays he runs a third prompt by hand that lists the five emails that came closest to the rule without meeting it.
How it went
Hourly checks were too noisy, so he cut to twice a day. The first report was just the agreed reply for an empty run, and a manual check confirmed none of the eleven new emails was from a person. In the first week Claude ran 14 times and he still opened Gmail 19 times, mostly to see if it had missed anything; he found nothing it missed. What actually cut his checking was turning off Gmail notifications. The Sunday near-miss prompt caught one venue change buried at the end of an unrelated email.
Worth knowing
Scheduled tasks need a paid plan and each run uses the plan's allowance. Runs happen on a clock, so late mail waits until the next morning, and attachments are seen only by name. Each run is kept as a session holding what it read. He cites published prompt-injection attacks on email assistants as the reason sending stays blocked. The post also sells his own Claude courses.