All ideasMore in Life admin
Life admin

His email bot misspelled its own urgent tag and buried a week of urgent mail

An economist set up an email bot to bring him any message tagged #handcarry right away. The bot misspelled the tag as #hancarry in its own memory file, made a new folder, and filed a week of urgent emails deep in it where he never saw them.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. He sets a rule: mail tagged #handcarry comes straight to him
  2. The bot writes the tag into its memory file with a typo, #hancarry
  3. It makes a new folder for the misspelled tag
  4. For about a week it files urgent mail there, deep in the folder tree
  5. He finds the buried mail and the typo

Why it’s worth knowing

Nothing crashed and nothing disobeyed. The bot followed its own typo faithfully and hid the mail it was built to surface.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on bsky.app. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

Life adminTriage my 2,000-email Outlook backlog and write native inbox rulesLife adminSecurity-review a suspicious email that passed every checkLife adminHe fought an eight month insurance dispute with AI as his co-counsel and won $10,250$10,250Life adminTriage my 9,209 unread emails into a daily response folder

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.