I gave up Outlook cold turkey. Then I vibe coded my own email client in an afternoon.
As an experiment, I committed to checking email through Claude and giving up Outlook altogether. Two things became obvious fast. Waiting for AI to reason before reading each email is way too slow. But AI is an amazing junk filter. Some emails are too nuanced for traditional filters, like real order updates from my sales rep vs. what feels like his daily prodding for new orders.
After a while I resigned myself to doing half the work in Claude and half in Outlook. Until I thought: what if I built my own terminal-based email client? I could keep it open next to Claude in VSCode and get the best of both worlds.
The first screenshot is the result. Every email is numbered, so I can say “take email #40 and generate a quote for a client.” When I want to read through emails myself, I fly through them with custom keyboard shortcuts (second screenshot). Best of all, everything arrives pre-triaged into urgency categories I’ve defined, so I can press Shift+J and all my junk email is flushed. I even wired the newsletter category into a Karpathy-style memory system, so I can chat with Claude about the topics I’m interested in.
This has turned out to be a surprisingly fun way to do email. The whole thing was vibe coded in one afternoon with Claude, which named it “Lookout.” When I asked why, it was rather pleased with itself: a clever rearrangement of “Outlook,” and it’s on the lookout for my emails. 😂 (It’s written in Go and compiles to a single 23 MB executable.)
I’ve been bragging to my wife about how empty my inbox is after our trip to Japan while she glares at me with inbox envy. I offered to build her one, but she had concerns about it “not being allowed” for city government work.
🌶️ Hot take: she isn’t wrong. Building this required an app registration in Microsoft 365, which I can do because I’m the admin. You may need to convince your IT team to allow it. But oh boy, is it liberating once you do. Something to think about next time you stare at the unread badge on your inbox.