I find beneficial uses for AI, bulk file management, editing work, and more. But, AI is already posing a massive problem with AI-generated emails. It is also encouraging mindless, automated emails like the one below. The number of emails like this (and on LinkedIn) is growing rapidly. If this gets much worse, I may revert to memos and a typewriter!
I get tired of this AI-generated incoherent generic gobbledygook spam at work.
“Barrett,
Still in Missouri? Saw that Westminster Christian Academy does college preparatory education services and figured it would be great to meet in person with you.
I’m Connor with Moonstone, and we work with education organizations increase pipeline performance with production-ready interactive experiences.
Wessdell, a similar education organization, recently generated 36 high-intent qualified leads, driving $3.6M in sales pipeline within 16 weeks. Across all clients, we see
Thought it might make sense to grab brunch near Chesterfield three weeks from now? Even if it’s not top of mind, I’d still love to connect for a proper introduction!
Best regards,
Connor
PS. You only pay for optimization if your conversion rate improves.”
That is completely meaningless, incoherent, and filled with incomprehensible jargon.
I gather they didn’t pony up for a top-tier bot. I’d block them for that alone. If you want my business, you better be prepared to ply me with a genuine champagne model, not mere sparkling inference.
He didn’t even bother to proofread his email before sending it. I don’t know why they think anyone would do business with someone that sent a communication like that. It wasn’t even industry-relevant.
That’s pretty annoying, and you have to use semantic filtering because they can vary words so easily now, which risks false positives, which makes me nervous.
I’m also thinking how to get on more free brunch lists…
I have a handful of server-side rules that keeps 95% of email from hitting my inbox. It would take me about 60 seconds to add this jokers email address, or his company’s domain, to my “mark as read and delete rule “
I have a lot of server-side rules, but I’m not sure how I would create one to avoid emails like this while not inadvertently sending legitimate emails to spam or trash.
My guess is that Connor didn’t even look at this message, nor the two dozen others that his AI agent generated and sent using who know what tools to identify potential clients.
If you use Gmail, Claude can scan your inbox and flag messages that meet the “likely generated by AI” criteria that you agree on. Those criteria can be anything from stylistic tells to recognizable types of unsolicited pitches.
If Gemini comes bundled with your Workspace account, Spark itself may be up to the task. (The latest Gemini model, Argon, is much improved over its predecessor.)
You should be able to connect Claude to your Workspace Gmail account if your Workspace administrator provides you with the right permissions to do so.
This one keeps all legitimate commercial and marketing email out of my inbox:
Matches: unsubscribe
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “Review”, Never send it to Spam
And a second version of the above rule does the same thing to 60+ specific email addresses.
Matches: from:( address1 OR address2 Or )
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “Review”, Never send it to Spam
I normally look at messages tagged Review once a day, and frequently delete 90% of them. It takes less than five minutes. The handful of messages that get to my INBOX are dealt with as they arrive or are assigned to a Task.
Indeed, decades ago, when my wife and I were in our twenties and still naive, we attended one of these. A terrible experience. The stay was not “free” if time and sanity are of any value!
