Secretary: AI-powered inbox-zero tool to manage your e-mails I built Secretary because I was tired of treating email like a full-time job

Email is one of those things that gets worse in small increments.

A few newsletters arrive. Someone asks a question that needs a short answer. There is a notification from a service I don’t remember signing up for. A client thread is sitting there waiting for a reply. None of these messages is particularly difficult, but together they create a queue of small decisions that keeps growing.

I built Secretary to make that queue easier to work through.

The idea is deliberately narrow. Secretary connects to your existing mailbox and presents messages one at a time. For each message, it suggests what to do next: archive it, reply, unsubscribe, mark it as spam, or skip it for later. You confirm the action yourself.

It is not supposed to become another place where you manage email. It is a tool for getting through email.

One message at a time

The main interface is intentionally simple.

Instead of opening an inbox with hundreds of messages and deciding where to start, Secretary gives you a working queue and asks you to deal with the next message.

A newsletter might get an unsubscribe suggestion. A message that looks unimportant can be archived. A real conversation can be left alone or turned into a reply.

Each suggestion comes with a reason, so the application isn’t silently making decisions in the background. You can accept the suggestion or choose another action.

That distinction is important to me.

I don’t want software sending email, deleting things or unsubscribing me from services without me seeing what it is doing first. The point is to reduce the number of decisions required to process the inbox, not to remove me from the process entirely.

The keyboard is the fastest part

Once you’re processing messages one after another, reaching for the mouse every time becomes unnecessary.

Secretary has six keyboard shortcuts covering the main workflow:

• A archives the message
• R starts a reply
• U unsubscribes
• M marks it as spam
• S skips it
• Enter confirms the suggested action

This is probably my favorite part of the interface because it makes the workflow quite mechanical. You read the message, decide whether the suggested action makes sense, and press a key.

You can also ignore the shortcuts completely. The normal interface exposes the same actions, so the keyboard support is there for people who want to move faster rather than being a requirement for using the application.

Replies are suggestions, not automation

Email is different from a newsletter because there is usually another person involved.

When a message needs a response, Secretary can generate reply drafts. It provides multiple options rather than one supposedly perfect answer, and you can edit the draft before doing anything with it.

Nothing gets sent automatically.

This is a fairly important boundary. An AI-generated reply can save time, but it can also be wrong, too formal, too casual, or simply inappropriate for the conversation. I would rather have the software get me 80% of the way there and leave the final decision to me.

The goal is reducing the friction of writing a reply, not pretending that every email can be safely automated.

I wanted the workflow to stay temporary

Another decision behind Secretary is that it shouldn’t become a second permanent mailbox.

The application is designed around short, focused sessions and temporary working inbox data. You connect your existing mailbox, process a batch of messages, and leave with a smaller queue.

That matches how I think email should be handled anyway.

I don’t particularly want another dashboard to check throughout the day. I’d rather spend a few focused sessions clearing messages and then get back to whatever I was actually doing.

This is also why the interface doesn’t try to reproduce every feature of a traditional email client. There are already plenty of applications for reading, searching, organizing and storing email. Secretary is focused on triage.

Why not just use Gmail or Outlook?

You can, and you probably should for most things.

The problem is that a normal inbox gives every message roughly the same visual importance. A newsletter, a client request and an automated notification all end up in the same list, and you have to decide what each one means.

Secretary adds another layer on top of the mailbox: what is the most sensible next action for this particular message?

That makes the application useful during a cleanup session. Instead of deciding how to organize the entire inbox, you’re repeatedly answering a much smaller question.

Archive this? Reply? Unsubscribe? Spam? Skip?

That is the whole loop.

It is free

Secretary is currently free to use. There are no pricing tiers or paid version of the core workflow.

That is intentional too. I wanted people to be able to connect a mailbox, try the workflow and decide whether it is useful without first having to figure out which subscription tier they need.

The project is available at secretary.xaviesteve.com.

If you regularly open your inbox, spend half an hour making small decisions, close it, and then find yourself doing exactly the same thing again later, Secretary is basically an attempt to make that process shorter.

It doesn’t try to make email disappear. It just makes the queue easier to get through.