8:30 AM: you kick off the inbox-zero loop while the coffee brews. 8:35 AM: yesterday's 50 unread messages are sorted into four buckets, replies are drafted for the ones that matter, the noise is archived, and you've approved the lot with a few keystrokes. The rest of the day, the inbox only contains new mail.
That's the daily rhythm an email agent can sustain — and the daily part is the whole trick. Inbox zero has never been hard to reach once; it's hard to keep, because the maintenance is boring. Boring, repetitive classification is exactly what agents are for. And it gets more interesting when the inbox in question belongs to the robot itself.
The loop: four buckets, five minutes
Pull a manageable batch of unread — 50 is the sweet spot; below 20 you waste setup overhead, above 50 you blow the LLM context budget and the approval review drags:
nylas email list --unread --limit 50 --json
