Comment by nonameiguess

The proposed alternative doesn't sound all that much better to me. You're hand crafting a bunch of rule-based heuristics, which is fine, but you could already do that with existing e-mail clients and I did. All the LLM is adding is auto-drafting of replies, but this just gets back to the "typing isn't the bottleneck" problem. I'm still going to spend just as long reading the draft and contemplating whether I want to send it that way or change it. It's not really saving any time.

A feature that seems to me would truly be "smart" would be an e-mail client that observes my behavior over time and learns from it directly. Without me prompting or specifying rules at all, it understands and mimics my actions and starts to eventually do some of them automatically. I suspect doing that requires true online learning, though, as in the model itself changes over time, rather than just adding to a pre-built prompt injected to the front of a context window.