Sort years of emails sent to yourself into do, keep and drop

Dubowsky searched his Gmail for mail from himself to himself and found 683 messages going back to 2023, many with one-word subjects or none at all. He connected Gmail to the Claude app and set the send, reply, forward and trash tools to Blocked first. He then ran four prompts. The first had Claude search those emails, keep only the ones where he was the sole recipient, and file each into do, keep or drop with a one-line reason, without moving or deleting anything. The second rewrote the do list as task, deadline and place, writing no date where none was given. The third listed every saved link by topic and flagged repeats without opening them. The fourth runs each Sunday over the last seven days and says where each new self-email belongs.

He had to split the search into four rounds, one per year. The result was 41 to do, 96 to keep and 546 to drop, and he deleted the 546 himself. Of the 41 tasks only nine still mattered. The link list showed he had sent himself the same recipe four times. He says the Sunday prompt takes about five minutes and is what stopped the pile growing back.

The connector cannot read attachments, only see that they exist, and large mailboxes need doing in slices. A to:me search also catches mail sent to other people at the same time, which is why the prompt limits it to sole-recipient emails. Self-emails often hold card or passport numbers, so skim before pasting any of it elsewhere. The post also sells the author's paid Claude setup.