The Email Management Challenge
For me, email is essential — I rely on it to connect with clients, submit drafts, and stay on top of industry news. But it takes just one day for my inbox to go from zero unread messages to around 100.
In the past, it used to take me an hour every morning to process everything. Now, I've reduced it to 15 minutes, and I want to share the details with you so that you can learn something useful from my fight with inbox clutter.
Overview of my (mostly) AI-powered email management tools:
| Tool | Type | Key Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Clean Email | Inbox Organizer | Quickly reduces inbox clutter through Cleaning Suggestions, one-click unsubscribes, and Auto Clean rules. |
| Outlook Copilot | AI Email Assistant | Summarizes lengthy email threads, drafts context-aware replies quickly. |
| Grammarly | AI Writing Assistant | Provides grammar checks and stylistic suggestions to help me polish my messages. |
| ActiveCampaign | AI Tool for Automating Marketing | Automates complex email sequences, segmentations, and brand-consistent email template designs. |
| ChatGPT/Claude | AI Data Analysis | Can be used to analyze all kinds of data. |
Clean Email: My Foundation for Email Management
🎯 Solved problem: My inbox used to be an overwhelming mess of unread messages, taking an hour daily to sort through. Clean Email slashed that time by automating the cleanup process.
The cornerstone of my email management routine is Clean Email, an inbox organizer with many useful features that typically let me reduce the number of unread messages by 70 percent or more in just 2-3 minutes.
I always start my morning by checking Cleaning Suggestions, which are based on messages that I've cleaned before or ones frequently cleaned by other users.
📌 For example, today, Clean Email suggested archiving messages from Notion (notifications mostly). All I had to do was click the Archive button next to the suggestion, and that was it. If a suggestion isn't relevant, I can dismiss it and move on.
Once I've processed the suggestions, I take a moment to scan the remaining messages for any unwanted subscriptions (they keep coming despite my best efforts to hide my email address from marketers). When I spot them, I use Clean Email's Unsubscriber feature to one-click unsubscribe. The tool sends unsubscribe requests on my behalf and even blocks mailing lists that don't respect such requests.
Also, check if there are any repeat messages I've already dealt with in the past. When I find them, I create Auto Clean rules so that Clean Email processes them automatically the next time they arrive—no work required.
📌 For example, I've set up rules to automatically trash old promotional messages and archive social media notifications.
With these few simple steps, my inbox contains only messages I need to reply to, which is the next stage of my morning Clean Email + AI inbox management routine.
Replying With (Mostly) AI-Powered Productivity Tools
🎯 Solved problem: Writing thoughtful replies to emails used to drain my energy and time. AI assistants now handle the heavy lifting while I refine the final touch.
Before I leave Clean Email and turn to AI email assistant tools, I take advantage of Clean Email's ability to reply to messages directly within the app.
It's always faster and safer (my memory is far from great) to reply to any message that can be handled very quickly right away—especially if the reply I want to write instantly pops into my head. The straightforward reply interface in Clean Email lets me fire off quick responses without switching platforms, which helps maintain my workflow momentum.
Sometimes I can actually handle all replies in Clean Email, but when that's not possible or practical, I open Outlook, my favorite mail client thanks to Copilot, Microsoft's AI for Outlook.
If a message is too long for me to quickly decide on an ideal reply (for example, if it's part of a thread involving multiple people), I often take advantage of Copilot's summary capabilities. I just click the "Summary by Copilot" button, and the AI quickly generates a concise summary that I can read in a few seconds with all key information conveniently highlighted.
Using Outlook's Copilot, I quickly draft replies by writing very brief prompts that state what I want the reply to include and the tone/style I'm aiming for. For example, a prompt might be as simple as "Reply professionally, thank them for the proposal, ask about timelines, mention our budget constraints." Within seconds, Copilot drafts a complete response that covers all these points.
📌 HOWEVER, I never send these AI-generated emails as-is. I always manually polish the writing so that I'm happy with it and don't send something I wouldn't write myself. I'm a writer after all—I don't want even the best AI-powered productivity tools to replace my voice. Instead, I want them to amplify it.
Before I hit send, I always use Grammarly to do a final AI spelling/grammar check. Grammarly can also suggest style changes, which are very useful because AI-generated replies can sometimes be robotic and somewhat unnatural.
I repeat this process until my inbox is empty, a state that previously seemed impossible to achieve but is now my daily norm thanks to the combination of Clean Email and AI tools for productivity.
Using AI for Email Marketing and Analytics
🎯 Solved problem: Email marketing felt like a chore I could never keep up with. ActiveCampaign’s AI automation turned it into a hands-off revenue driver.
Before AI tools for work productivity became what they are today, I used to neglect email marketing because I found it too time-consuming, cumbersome, and just not my thing.
I would attempt to attract clients by giving out free information to show my expertise to those who decided to subscribe to my mailing list, for example, but then I wouldn't do anything with the mailing list itself.
That has changed since I started using ActiveCampaign, one of the best AI email automation tools.
With its AI automation builder, I simply type a plain-language prompt describing what I want to achieve—for example, "Send a welcome series to new subscribers, then follow up with product recommendations based on what links they click"—and the AI creates the entire automation workflow for me.
The AI automation builder handles conditional logic, split actions, and can take advantage of data from across my digital ecosystem through its 900+ integrations. I can, of course, also fine-tune everything to my liking using a familiar drag-and-drop interface.
Besides the AI builder, I also love that I can feed ActiveCampaign with my site's fonts and colors, and it designs email templates that match my branding using the AI Brand Kits feature. I'm quite happy with the basic plan, though even more AI features are available for those who pay more.
📌 In addition to marketing, I also use AI to analyze my email data when needed.
Recently, I wanted to find out which clients I spend the most time communicating with and correlate this with earnings information to identify any clients who might be taking up too much of my time relative to their contribution to my income.
I extracted data from my email history (thanks to Clean Email's organization making this much easier) and compiled a simple spreadsheet with the number of emails exchanged with each client over the past quarter alongside my earnings from each. Then I used AI tools for automating data analysis—specifically Claude AI—to analyze this information.
The results were eye-opening. Two clients who ranked in my top 5 for email volume were actually among my lowest revenue generators. Meanwhile, my most profitable client ranked 7th in terms of email volume—showing a highly efficient relationship.
Final Words
The combination of Clean Email for inbox organization, AI assistants for composition, and AI analytics tools for business intelligence has fundamentally changed my relationship with email. What was once a source of daily stress is now a streamlined system that works for me, not against me. And the best part is that many of these tools offer free tiers or affordable plans that make them accessible to freelancers and small businesses.
Beyond email management, AI offers a wealth of additional applications that can vastly improve how we work and live. Be smart and learn how to use AI to be more productive at work and in your personal life so that you can focus on what truly matters.
