I Was Spending 2 Hours a Day on Email. So I Built Something to Fix It.
Two hours of every morning disappeared into my inbox before I did a single hour of real work. Newsletters, receipts, cold pitches — all mixed in with things that actually mattered. So I built Zer0Email.
Two hours. That's roughly how much of my morning used to disappear into my inbox before I'd done a single hour of real work. Newsletters I never opened, receipts I didn't need yet, cold pitches mixed in with things that actually mattered. So I built Zer0Email, an AI tool that connects to Gmail and Outlook and handles all of that automatically. Here's how it started and where it stands today.
Why filters and folders never solved it
I tried the obvious fixes first. Gmail filters, colour-coded labels, a folder system I rebuilt every few months hoping the new version would finally stick. None of it held up.
The problem with filters is that they're rigid. They catch what you tell them to catch and miss everything you didn't think to write a rule for. A new newsletter shows up and it's back in your main inbox until you notice and fix it manually. A vendor changes their sending address and your filter quietly stops working. You end up maintaining the system more than the system helps you.
What I actually needed wasn't more rules. It was something that understood what an email was about and acted on it the way I would — without me having to predict every case in advance.
What I built instead
That's the gap Zer0Email fills. Zer0Email is an AI-powered inbox management tool for Gmail and Outlook that uses intelligent routing, auto-labeling, and prioritisation to keep email organised automatically. Instead of writing rules for every scenario, you connect your inbox and the AI handles the judgment calls: newsletters get archived, receipts get labelled, cold outreach gets routed out of your main view, and the emails that actually need your attention surface to the top.
It also comes with a prebuilt rules library spanning categories like inbox zero, staying informed, finance, meetings, shopping, and security — so you're not starting from a blank slate. There's a calendar feature built on the Google Calendar API too, since email and scheduling are rarely separate problems in practice.
Where Zer0Email is today
What started as me trying to fix my own inbox is now a team of six building this full time. Zer0Email processes 50,000+ emails a day across the people using it, and we're in active growth — building out real usage data and a distribution presence ahead of raising.
The product is deployed on Azure, there's a free trial with no credit card required, and the Pro plan is $9 a month once you're ready to upgrade.
Originally published on Medium.