Claude Cowork: Email, Calendar & Organizing

Find forgotten online accounts from old signup emails with Claude Cowork and other AI agents

Ben Patterson wanted to know how many forgotten accounts were left over from years of testing products. For PCWorld, Patterson gave a prompt to Claude Cowork, Gemini Spark, Meta's Muse and a ChatGPT Dot: search the last 5 years of email for welcome, verification and password-reset messages, build a spreadsheet of services with first and last email dates, whether the service is on haveibeenpwned.com's list of breached sites, and its official account-deletion link, with the most dormant at the top, and don't sign in, reset passwords or contact anyone. All four returned spreadsheets in five minutes to half an hour; each found at least 50 accounts, and the ChatGPT Dot found 73. Patterson found accounts they'd forgotten, such as a Bowers & Wilkins account from 2022. About half the deletion links came back 'not found' or pointed to privacy FAQs.

Let Claude Cowork tidy a family desktop, and lose 15 years of camera photos until iCloud recovery brings them back

Nick Davidov asked Claude Cowork to organise their spouse's desktop. It asked permission to delete temporary Office files, they agreed, and then it said "ooops": while renaming, it had deleted a folder with every photo the spouse had taken on their camera over 15 years. The deletion was done in the terminal, so nothing was in the Trash; iCloud had already synced the new structure, there was no Time Machine backup, and disk recovery tools found nothing. Apple pointed them to iCloud's recovery feature, which keeps removed iCloud Drive files for 30 days, and the photos started coming back. Their advice: don't let these tools near anything hard to repair or not under version control.

Rename a pile of train tickets by date and destination with Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork read a pile of train tickets and renamed each file by its correct date and destination.

Turn an inbox into a daily to-do list with Claude Cowork (abandoned)

Claude Cowork summarized the poster's email into a to-do list, but the list grew long and unmanageable, so the poster stopped reading it and turned it off as a waste of tokens.