Automated inbox cleanup for busy people using delegated access

Executive Summary

Busy professionals, independent contractors, and productivity-conscious consumers increasingly suffer from inbox fatigue: they spend discretionary time triaging newsletters, promotional blasts, and low-value threads that add little business value. An addressable market of roughly 200 million paying productivity-minded email users and a $7.2 billion TAM (at a $36 ACV) shows a clear willingness to pay for time-saving email services. The product would use delegated access (OAuth and provider-supported limited scopes) to perform automated triage and cleanup: unsubscribe detection, thread clustering, bulk archive/delete with an undo window, smart retention policies, and a human-in-the-loop review for high-risk items. Key design choices would be privacy-first (no password storage, auditable actions, optional on-device or client-side model inference), transparent explainability of each action, and easy onboarding that learns from a few corrections per user. Market timing is favorable because inbox fatigue is rising, privacy-first consumer preferences are growing, and recent NLP gains improve unsubscribe detection and intent classification—supporting both demand and technical feasibility for scalable automation. The idea’s strengths are clear privacy signals, a sizable willingness-to-pay at roughly $3/month, and technical defensibility through per-user models and reversible operations; the main challenges are building trust (avoiding false deletions), handling provider API limits, and differentiating from mid-level competition that already offers basic cleanup features.