Email management
Multiplayer integrates directly with your Gmail account to help you manage your inbox. This section of the documentation will go into depth on his functionality works in order to provide you with transparency into Multiplayer’s behavior.
Labeling your emails
Overview
In order to reduce the volume of email in your inbox, Multiplayer proactively triages emails and keeps only those that are important or actionable in your inbox.
This behavior is modeled after how many human assistants process the inboxes of executives around the world today. The labels and methodologies we employ are considered best practices and standard for many in the industry.
Note that we never delete any of your emails, instead we utilize a practice of labeling emails (i.e. putting them into appropriate folders), archiving non-essential emails (which can be retrieved later), and summarizing information via personalized audio podcast for the user (delivered daily).
Initial setup of label categories (i.e. folders)
When you first activate Multiplayer, Multiplayer creates a set of standardized labels in your inbox.
When using a work-specific or custom domain, the folder labels will be:
@username (where username would be your first name, for example @Alfred)
calendar
events
financial/receipts
newsletters
notifications
sales
travel
When using a personal email address (i.e. username@gmail.com), the folder labels will be slightly modified for personal context:
@username (where username would be your first name, for example @Angela)
calendar
events
financial/receipts
newsletters
notifications
orders
promotional
sales discounts
travel
Note that some categories like “travel” will not appear until an email that belongs in that category is observed by Multiplayer.
Label definitions
@username
This category is for emails that are directly relevant to you and likely require your action, awareness, or are of an important or urgent nature.
For personal email, this includes emails related to conversations, email threads you initiate, messages from friends and family, job hunting, networking, etc.
For work email, this includes emails from colleagues, people you appear to have a business relationship with, and work-related tasks that likely need your attention.
Some emails that are important or urgent may belong to other categories (such as a security alert notification, bill to pay, or meeting cancellation). Multiplayer will ensure you do not miss those emails, though they will not label them as @username.
calendar
The calendar category is specifically for calendar events and notifications related to them. For example: meeting invites, confirmations, and declines, etc. This is distinct from the following category, “events.”
This is to give a clear view of all of your calendar events and notifications in one place.
events
The events category is for more general events that are not-specific to you. Common to this category would be things like networking events, music concerts, speaking events, weekend activities like street fairs, etc. The way we separate out these types of emails is if they are a broad invitation to many attendees and that your presence is not specific to the event (like a calendar invite might indicate).
All event updates will also appear here like ticket confirmations, messages from hosts, etc.
financial/receipts
This category is meant to capture all financial-related emails. This would include bills, invoices, receipts, etc. To keep this category free of less important noise, emails that are considered to be more akin to notifications or promotional from your credit card company, bank, or even vendors will not appear here, but in one of the other categories, typically notifications or sales/promotional.
newsletters
For those of us who subscribe to newsletters or updates, these emails will be placed into the newsletter category. In some cases, the organizations you receive news from will send promotional emails pretending to be newsletters; those emails will oftentimes be categorized as sales or promotional. We do this in an effort to ensure the emails you receive in this category are generally informative and worth your time to read.
notifications
Notifications from apps, services, and vendors will appear here. These generally are automated messages regarding some action that occurred in a third-party application or service. Common examples of this include: a login from a new device, an update from Linkedin about your network, Amazon asking you to review a product, an update from your cloud service provider.
When a notification is urgent or likely requires your attention or action, Multiplayer will ensure you see it. This could be for example, a security alert, or a notification that requires you to fix something.
orders
This label captures a concise list of emails associated with orders and order tracking. For instance, Amazon, UPS, FedEx tracking and order information. Receipts for purchases, etc. will fall under the financial/receipts category.
Note this category only appears for personal email accounts.
promotional
This category is for sales or promotional content. This could be clothing advertisements, advertisements or content marketing for brands you love, etc. Think of this as all the salesy stuff trying to get you to buy something.
Note this category only appears for personal email accounts.
sales discounts
For those of us who love a good discount, this folder identifies emails that contain unique discounts. For example: Black Friday deals, clearances, special discounts, etc.
Standard promotional sales emails will not be featured here.
Note this category only appears for personal email accounts.
travel
For emails related to travel bookings such as flights, hotels, etc. This is designed to be a concise list of emails for referencing during travel when you’re looking for flight numbers, hotel addresses, etc.
This label will not contain information related to rewards programs, promotions, or other emails from travel-related companies.
How Multiplayer processes emails
When your email account receives a new email, Multiplayer is notified. Multiplayer then reads the email in order to determine what category the email belongs to and identify if there are any urgent or important attributes that need your attention.
Once an email is labeled, no further action is taken with that particular email. Any additional manual labeling, automations, or workflows you use will not conflict with Multiplayer. If you change a default label created by Multiplayer, we will label emails using the same criteria; however, we will honor the name change you create. Note that if you delete all of your labels from Multiplayer without replacing them, we may assume you intended to delete your Multiplayer account and we may reach out to you for confirmation.
A note about security: Multiplayer does not store the contents of your email on our servers as part of how we secure your data and privacy.
Archiving
A key aspect of keeping your inbox clean and with a minimal unread count is to archive emails that do not absolutely require your attention or are not of urgent or important nature. This is probably the feature that requires the most “getting used to” in Multiplayer. This practice is modeled after our observations of best in class executive assistants who process inboxes for their executives; it is key to staying on top of busy inboxes where ANYONE can flood your inbox with demands for your attention.
If you are unfamiliar with Gmail’s archiving capabilities, you can read more here about it: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6576
Multiplayer’s workflow for determining what stays in your inbox is as follows:
Label all emails
If an email is @username, keep it in the inbox
If an email is urgent or important, keep it in the inbox
Archive all other emails
Once an email is archived, you can still access it at any time by:
Navigating to a label folder
Searching
Going to the All Mail view
The intention is that you should be able to view the archived emails at any time in the respective folders on your time; however, this should not be required of you to clear your inbox to understand what’s in it. By archiving non-actionable, routine, emails that are not directly related to your work, we aim to reduce the time and anxiety spent fighting to maintain control of your inbox.
Archiving special scenarios
Multiplayer will set timers to archive emails that have a limited time relevance automatically. For instance, one-time passcodes, etc. These will usually archive from your inbox in 24 hours.
Multiplayer also sends you emails to your inbox, much like a human assistant might send you briefings and updates throughout your day. In order to not contribute to the noise in your inbox, Multiplayer will archive its own emails to you when they are no longer relevant (i.e. meeting prep emails after the meeting has occurred or daily briefings after the day is complete).
Drafts
Drafts is a beta feature that automatically drafts email responses for you. To learn more about this feature in testing and development, contact us at hello@multiplayer.work
What Multiplayer does not do
Multiplayer does not delete your emails
You can rest assured that if you received an email, it is in your email and Multiplayer did not delete it.
If you’re having trouble finding a particular email that you believe is missing, try searching or skimming through your label folders or “All Mail” views.
Multiplayer does not learn from how you use your inbox
To ensure privacy and to build standardized, predictable behavior, Multiplayer does not train or learn from the actions you take in your inbox. For instance if you manually relabel an email, Multiplayer AI is not learning from that action. This allows us to provide better quality control since all users have the same AI settings and we are able to conduct our own thorough testing. This also allows us to avoid using user data to train models.
If you have feedback about improving the email management experience, do not hesitate to contact us at hello@multiplayer.work as we would love to learn more about your suggestions and make improvements.