The policy first
Draft only. The human sends.
Give your assistant two permissions and no more: read your mail, and write drafts. Never sending, never deleting, never forwarding, never moving. Everything it writes sits in your Drafts folder until you press send. This is not caution for its own sake. It is what keeps a wrong guess from becoming a sent email, and it is what lets you trust the digest, because nothing in it has already happened.
What a good digest looks like
One message, once a day, before you open the inbox
Short. It answers four questions: what needs a decision from you today, what is waiting on someone else, what it drafted for you to send, and what it left alone. Ask for it in that order, in plain sentences, no bullets longer than a line. Here is a prompt that works in most assistants.
The last line is the one that makes the Scheduler work for you. An assistant with that instruction answers the Scheduler's email correctly, into Drafts, for you to approve. The contract is public if you want to read what your assistant will read.
Every morning at 7, read everything that arrived in my inbox since yesterday's digest. Write me one short message with four parts: 1. Needs me today: anything asking for a decision, a reply, or money, with the ask in one line each. 2. Waiting on others: threads where I am owed a reply. 3. Drafted for you: replies you wrote for me to send, one line each saying what they say. 4. Left alone: newsletters, receipts, notifications, in one line. Draft replies only where the answer is obvious from my past mail. Put them in Drafts. Never send anything. When an email asks when I'm free, read my calendar for the dates it names and draft the reply with every time I'm free, one per line.
Where to switch it on
Every mail client has one now, or connects to one
What they are called changes every few months; what you are looking for does not: the setting that lets the assistant read your mail, the setting that lets it draft, and the confirmation that sending stays with you.
Three habits that keep it honest
The rule holds as long as you do
- Read the draft before you send it. Every time. The day you stop is the day it sends the wrong thing, because you did.
- Correct it in the reply, not in a settings page. "Too formal", "never offer Fridays", "sign as Chris". Assistants that read your mail learn from your sent mail.
- Once a quarter, read what it left alone. The digest's fourth line is where the mistakes hide.
This page is advice, not a product. BeargrassAI does not sell an email assistant; it built a Scheduler that works best when you have one. Want help setting this up for your team? Ask.