You don't need to be an engineer to build your own inbox workflow

A friend asked me a simple question the other day. Could this+that tell him who sends him email and how much, so he could finally tidy up his inbox? Just a tally: these ten senders account for half of what lands in your inbox, here they are, ranked.

It is a great example of a thing that is easy to want and oddly hard to get. Open Gmail or Outlook and there is no button for it. You can search one sender at a time, but you cannot ask “rank everyone.” So most people reach for one of two options. They install a single-purpose cleaner like Clean Email or Mailstrom, which groups your mailbox by sender and does exactly this one job well. Or, if they are technical, they pull their mail through an API and write a script, or ask an AI agent to do it for them in the moment. Either way the answer is a throwaway. You look at it once, archive a few newsletters, and the next month you are back where you started with no record of what changed.

A workflow gives you a third option, and it changes who gets to have it. You do not write a script and you do not wait for someone technical. You describe the question in plain language, once, and this+that builds the thing that answers it. It runs on its own, and the answer lives somewhere you can reuse it.

The recipe

Here is the version I built for my friend. Three steps.

1. A schedule. The workflow runs every Monday morning. No one has to remember to kick it off.
2. Read the recent inbox. A step pulls the latest batch of messages across the channels you have connected, not just Gmail but Slack, Outlook, and the rest if you use them.
3. Tally and write it down. An AI step counts how many messages came from each sender, ranks them, and writes the result to a page in your brain titled something like “Who’s emailing me.” If the page already exists, it adds this week’s numbers to it.

That third step is the part the point tools do not do. The answer is not a dashboard you glance at and lose. It is a page in your knowledge base that you, your assistant, or your teammates can open any time, and that the workflow keeps current.

Why the brain changes the shape of the answer

Because the page persists and updates, a one-week snapshot turns into a running picture. Week over week you can watch a noisy sender climb, or see a vendor go quiet. A throwaway script cannot show you that. A page that accumulates can.

It also means the answer is wired into everything else this+that does. The brain is what grounds the assistant and the workflows, so once “Who’s emailing me” exists, the same engine can act on it. You can add steps that archive or label mail from the senders you have decided are noise, or route certain senders straight to a task. The tally stops being a report you read and becomes something the system uses.

The same pattern, any question

Counting senders is just the first thing my friend happened to ask for. The reason it is worth showing is that the shape is reusable. Anything you can describe about your inbox, you can stand up as a workflow that keeps the answer in your brain:

• Which newsletters arrived this week that you never opened.
• Who you owe a reply to and how long they have been waiting.
• Which threads with a client went quiet in the last month.
• How much of your week went to one project, by message volume.

None of these has a button in your mail client. All of them are a short workflow away, and all of them land in the same place.

What it does not do, honestly

Two things worth being straight about. First, the read step works on a recent window, the latest batch of messages, not a sweep of your entire ten-year archive. That is why the weekly, accumulating version is the right design: the picture builds up over time rather than trying to crunch everything in one pass. If what you want is a one-time, bulk delete-by-sender across your whole mailbox, a dedicated cleaner is still the better tool for that exact job. Second, the AI step does the counting and the writing, so you describe what you want in plain language rather than wiring up a rigid formula. That is what makes it flexible, and it is also why you will want to read the first page it produces before you trust it on a schedule.

The point is not that we have built a better inbox cleaner. It is that the thing you actually wanted, a custom answer about your own inbox that sticks around and does something, used to require either a tool that did precisely one thing or an engineer who could write the script. Now it is a workflow you can describe in a sentence.

Key takeaways

• The custom answer you wanted about your own inbox used to need a one-off app or an engineer who could script it. Now you describe it in a sentence and a workflow builds it.
• A common, hard-to-get request, “who emails me and how much,” is a short workflow in this+that: schedule, read recent mail, tally by sender, write to your brain.
• The advantage over a one-shot script or cleaner is persistence. The answer lives in your brain, updates on a schedule, and the same engine can act on it.
• The pattern generalizes to almost any question about your inbox, none of which your mail client has a button for.
• It reads a recent window rather than your full archive, so the accumulating weekly version is the right design, and a dedicated cleaner still wins for a one-time bulk sweep.

If you want to see what this would surface in your own inbox, try this+that free and connect your accounts.