Why Can't AI Empty My Inbox?
AI Summary
Cal Newport ran an experiment for a New Yorker piece ("Why Can't A.I. Manage My E-Mail?"): he turned over his overflowing newsletter inbox to Cora, an aggressive AI tool that aims to reduce inboxes to messages requiring response and summarizes the rest in twice-daily briefings. Cora's pitch: 90% of emails don't require a reply, so why read them in arrival order? After running it, Newport found his inbox shrunk to a much smaller set of messages he actually cared about, with occasional over-filtering that he could recover from the daily briefings.
The deeper question — the one that drove the article — is whether AI will move beyond filtering to actually answering email on our behalf. Newport frames this as the modern Turing test, riffing on Alan Turing's 1950 imitation game: chatbots pass the original imitation game easily, but no machine has yet conquered the inbox game. Cora can't. Neither can SuperHuman, SaneBox, or any other tool he surveyed. The technical obstacles to AI-drafted, AI-sent email replies remain unsolved.
Within the current constraints — filtering and summarizing — there's still room for evolution. Newport saw a demo of an experimental tool that turns the inbox into a narrative "intelligence briefing" and lets you direct replies in natural language. After a four-day trip, his Cora-managed inbox contained only twenty-four relevant emails. His one-line conclusion: "I don't need HAL 9000; an orderly inbox is enough for now."
Highlights
- ▸Email automation is the real Turing test: chatbots pass the original imitation game easily, but no AI tool — Cora, SuperHuman, SaneBox — can yet draft and send replies on your behalf
- ▸Cora reduced Newport's inbox to 24 relevant messages after a 4-day trip by aggressive filtering and twice-daily summary briefings — the wins available now are filtering and summarization, not autonomous response
- ▸The most useful AI productivity tools are practical fixes to long-standing chores (orderly inbox), not super-charged chatbot oracles or universal task automators — a HAL 9000 isn't the goal
Original excerpt
The address that I use for this newsletter has long since been overrun by nonsense. Seemingly every PR and marketing firm in existence has gleefully added it to the various mailing lists that they use to convince their clients that they offer global reach. I recently received, for example, a message announcing a new uranium mining venture. Yesterday morning, someone helpfully sent me a note to alert me that “CPI Aerostructures Reports Third Quarter and Nine Month 2025 Results.”
Here’s the problem: this is _also_ the address where my readers send me interesting notes about my essays, or point me toward articles or books they think I might like. I want to read these messages, but they’re often…
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