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Bruno Ashford @brunoashfordSubscribeModule 6 · Lesson 6.2 · 12 min
Email, Calendar and Docs
Connect Gmail or Microsoft 365 and Google Drive so Claude can read, summarise and draft, with sending kept under your control.
Use ← → to move. The marker highlights text and the pencil draws on the slide; navigation locks while you annotate. Undo removes the last mark, Esc exits.
1Add the connectors in your Claude account
In claude.ai, open the connectors settings and add Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive, or the Microsoft 365 connector if your company runs on Outlook and SharePoint. Sign in with your work account and review the permissions screen before you accept. Connectors your organisation admin has not approved may be unavailable on Team or Enterprise plans, which is a good thing.
2Confirm they appear in Claude Code
Start Claude Code while logged in with the same account and open the /mcp panel. The claude.ai connectors appear alongside any servers you added in the terminal. If one shows as needing authentication, select it and follow the sign-in flow.
/mcp3Run a read-only inbox triage
Your first task only reads. Ask for a triage of the last 48 hours sorted by what needs you, what can be delegated and what can be ignored. Check it against your inbox manually the first three times.
Read my unread emails from the last 48 hours. Do not send, archive, label or delete anything. Give me a table with: sender, subject, what they want, urgency (high, medium, low), and who should handle it (me, my team, nobody). Then list the three messages I must answer today.4Move to drafts, never sends
Once the triage is reliable, let Claude create drafts for routine replies. Drafts sit in your email client waiting for you. You review, edit and send in seconds instead of writing from scratch.
For each message you marked 'me' and routine, create a draft reply in my email, in my voice from CLAUDE.md. Keep each under 120 words. Do not send anything. When you finish, list the drafts you created so I can review them.5Block sending with a permission rule
Belt and braces: in your project settings, add a deny rule for any tool that sends email, so even a confusing instruction cannot send on your behalf. MCP tools are named in the pattern mcp__server__tool, and you can see the exact names in the /mcp panel. You will learn the full permissions system in Module 11.
6Connect documents for context, not just storage
With Drive connected, Claude can find the last proposal you sent a client, read a signed contract, or pull numbers from a shared sheet. Ask it to cite the file name and link for every fact it uses, so you can verify in one click.
Most owners I meet spend the first hour of the day inside their inbox, triaging messages that a trained assistant could sort in ten minutes. The truth that hurts: you are the highest paid person in the company and you are doing the lowest leverage task in it.
In this lesson you connect the three systems that eat the most owner time: email, calendar and documents. The rule for the whole module starts here. Claude reads and drafts. You send.
Key points
- Connect email, calendar and documents through your Claude account connectors.
- Stage 1 is read-only triage; stage 2 is drafts; sending stays human.
- A deny rule on send tools protects you from any ambiguous instruction.
- Ask for file names and links so every fact can be verified.
Avoid
- Letting the agent send emails in week one because the drafts looked good.
- Connecting a personal Gmail and a work Gmail and forgetting which one the agent is reading.
- Asking for 'clean up my inbox' without saying what may be archived or deleted.
A four-person accounting practice in Manchester connected Microsoft 365. During tax season, the senior partner asked Claude every morning for a triage of client emails plus a list of documents still missing per client, checked against the shared folder. Claude drafted polite chaser emails for each missing document, all left as drafts. The partner reviewed and sent them in about 15 minutes, a job that previously took most of the morning.