I Let an AI Agent Manage My Emails for 30 Days. Here's What Broke.

Thirty days ago I handed my email inbox to an AI agent called Donna and told her to manage it. Not assist with it. Manage it. Triage, flag, draft replies, decide what needed my attention and what did not. I run five businesses and receive somewhere between 80 and 150 emails a day. I was drowning. The experiment felt necessary. Here is an honest account of what worked, what broke, and what I would do differently. The Setup Donna is one of 23 agents in my fleet, running on a dedicated OpenClaw gateway on a Mac Mini. She has access to three email accounts via IMAP and Microsoft Graph API, can read and send emails, and has a memory system that persists context between sessions. The configuration was simple: Check emails every 30 minutes during business hours Triage into: urgent (needs my attention today), important (can wait 24h), informational (FYI only), and noise (unsubscribe candidates) Flag urgent emails via Telegram message Draft replies for anything that looked routine Never send wi