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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Claude Cowork turned inbox chaos into usable article research.
- Gmail search struggled with context and discernment.
- Human verification remains essential before using AI-found quotes.
How often have you had to sift through a ton of emails to find messages you need? I'm not talking about searching for one or two by a proper name. I'm talking about finding a set of email messages on a specific theme from the thousands in your inbox.
I had to do this a few weeks ago. Because of my role as a tech journalist, my inbox overflows with people and companies pitching me on something or other. Because part of my beat is AI, my Gmail gets positively slammed whenever I write about something that a company executive or PR rep wants to be included in. And, you know what? Sometimes I find those pitches to be quite valuable.
**Also: **Anthropic's Claude Cowork heads to the cloud as data shows 90% of sessions aren't for coding
Take, for example, the day last month when it became apparent that Anthropic was throttling Fable 5 users down to Opus. A whole bunch of folks, including genuine experts on the topic, sent me emails with their comments on the disclosure. That was a busy week. I received more than 7,000 emails, almost all related to something having to do with AI, Claude, Fable, and the rest.
Gmail's Gemini has limits #
In the past, I would spend hours sifting through my emails to find the information I needed. But this is the age of AI, so I asked Gmail to do it for me. Sometimes, Gmail's Gemini does a pretty good job.
Not this time. This time, it failed spectacularly. Here's what I asked it:
Look in my Gmail promotions tab. I received a lot of emails from people who have opinions or want to be quoted about Anthropic's Fable 5. Please summarize the basic pitches for each of them (going back to Monday). Highlight any quotes or pitches that push back against Fable's restrictions as either too restrictive or not restrictive enough.
I think Gmail just couldn't understand the context in each message. It does well when I ask it to find simple messages or topics, or the latest email from a company. But this involved a request for discernment.
Gmail wasn't up to the task. But Claude Cowork was. Here's how that works.
Letting Claude loose in my email #
This was the genuinely hard part. Emotionally, that is. If there's anything I consider my confidential crown jewels, it's my email archive. I'm fairly comfortable letting Gemini loose on it. I figure that since it's running on Google infrastructure, Google has probably already hoovered up anything juicy in my Gmail. That ship has sailed.
But letting Claude into my email took a leap of faith. I am not good at leaps of faith. So this was hard. But my email has also always been a bit of a bottleneck. If Cowork could save me half a day of tedious mail sifting, it might be worth the trade-off.
**Also: **I let Anthropic's Claude Cowork loose on my files, and it was both brilliant and scary
What was it ol' Ben Franklin said? "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." It's a stretch, but letting Claude loose in my email would liberate some of my time, and Anthropic's reputation for security seems to indicate the process would be fairly safe. Hopefully, I'm not giving up either liberty or safety.
To make this work, you'll need to connect Claude to Gmail using a connector. Go to Claude settings, then Connectors, and select Gmail. As you can see, I granted Claude permission to read my Gmail, but not write (send) anything.
To keep my paranoia properly in check, I disabled the connector once this project was complete.
Putting Cowork to work #
My challenge was twofold: first, make sure that Cowork actually produced the value I needed. Second, don't get so caught up in making Cowork do what I wanted that I spend more time fiddling with it than I would have if I had just gathered what I needed manually. Yes, that's a trap I've fallen into so many times.
I'm an engineer. It's a real occupational hazard.
I used the same prompt I showed you above. In a little over a minute, Cowork identified 12 PR pitches. Cowork also noticed, "most of these are cybersecurity vendors using the launch as a news hook." Ya think?
**Also: **I had Gemini and Claude write my email replies - but only one sounds like me
The good news is that most folks who try to use a news event as a kicking-off point for pitching their own goals generally include some useful perspective relative to the event they're triggering off of. That's what makes them potentially good sources for press mentions.
My first exposure to the phenomenon was way back in one of my earliest jobs. My boss, a product manager, was always badgering our PR person to get him "mentions." Basically, he wanted to get his name in the trade press as often as possible. Sure, the company's name and products were important, but his goal was personal promotion. If he could get quoted or mentioned, he'd become better known.
This is all part of the weird world of PR. Companies pay PR firms out of their company budgets. But executives in those companies often try to leverage the offerings of their companies and use the associated PR efforts to boost their own careers. And we writers try to leverage the executives and the companies to get more value for our articles.
It works because the more perspectives we can present about a news event, the more rounded the coverage becomes. In this case, I specifically asked Cowork to highlight emails that push back against Fable's restrictions as either too restrictive or not restrictive enough.
Also: I used Gmail's AI tool to do hours of work for me in 10 minutes - with 3 prompts
My next request was for Cowork to sift through those relevant pitches and identify the ones that had enough information to enable me to use them directly in my article. But I also wanted to make sure I had permission to publish, so here was the next prompt.
Find the pieces that contain full, on-record statements with explicit permission to publish, especially emails that say "free to use in any piece" or "free to use in coverage."
This gave me a set of email messages that might be useful to cull quotes from, and whose message content I knew I had permission to use.
Next, I wanted to have Cowork pull good submissions and give me a clear list. But the key was that I didn't want it to modify folks' quotes. Don't worry. "Trust, but verify" is very active here. I built a fairly large prompt in a few stages.
First, I set up the loop. It tells Cowork that it should produce a list of entries and do so from the email messages it previously validated.
For each validated email message, use this format. Separate each of the quotes with two blank lines. Do not apply any styling to any of the formatting.
Next is the part that tells Cowork how to format the person's information at the beginning of the entry. I like it this way because I can quickly scan and decide if the person's title or company makes that person more authoritative for the article.
The general format will be one of the following:
Name of person
Title of person
Company of person
Note: Be careful. This sort of email is often sent by a PR representative who is a different individual from the person being considered for a quote. Be sure you're listing the company executive or the subject matter expert, not the public relations contact.
Next is the request to extract the meat of the quote. This is the material I considered for working into the article.
Extract a usuable statement, word-for-word, no changes. If any of the quotes are particularly relevant to usage concerns about Fable and need a second paragraph, put it in a second paragraph.
Notice I specified both word-for-word and no changes. Would it abide by this? Who knows?
Follow that with a URL to the company or, if you can't find one, a URL to the person's LinkedIn account.
Follow that, on its own line, with a link to the original email address
Follow that with a link to the email message itself
That last line is key. I wanted the AI to sift through all of my email and cull usable statements, but it's still my responsibility once a quote goes into the article. So if I found a quote in Cowork's list that I wanted to use, I used the link provided to open the email message and personally verify all of the information before I used it.
This is critically important. I used Cowork as a research assistant, not as an author.
Worth it! #
I have to say this was a very valuable experience and definitely a tool I will deploy again. Cowork did all the grunt work in a thankless and boring task that normally takes me hours and hours. It sifted through thousands of email messages and presented me with a list of eight validated sources and quotes.
If you want to see the article where I used this, here it is: Claude Fable 5 secretly throttled AI researchers, and the internet went wild
The time it took for me to do my due diligence with the list of eight sources was just a few minutes. I could devote the bulk of my time to writing, with the bonus of not winding up cranky and stressed because I had just spent the bulk of a day doing glorified clerical work.
**Also: **I tested ChatGPT vs. Claude to see which is better - and if it's worth switching
Anthropic calls this "the work around the work," which I think, as a concept, has legs. I will definitely call on Cowork again if I have another administrivia-heavy task I want to offload.
Would you let Claude Cowork read your Gmail if it could save you hours of tedious research? Let us know in the comments below.
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