You've tried this before. You open Claude, type "write me a newsletter about time management", and get back something that reads like a motivational poster had a baby with a corporate memo. So you rewrite most of it, which takes longer than writing it yourself, and you conclude AI can't do your emails.

Here's how bad generic AI writing has got: Wikipedia's own editors keep a field guide for catching it — Signs of AI writing — a running catalogue of the exact phrases and habits that give AI away. Puffery like "stands as a testament". Tidy rule-of-three sentences. "Not only... but also." Your readers can't always name the tells, but they can smell them — and they hit delete.

AI isn't the problem. The setup is. The fix: instead of describing your voice to Claude, or pasting emails in one by one, you connect Claude to your Gmail and let it read your actual sent mail. Not how you think you write — how you provably, in-the-wild write. (Yes, we're using AI to make sure your emails don't sound like AI. I'm aware. That's the one joke about it you're getting.)

Think of the skill as a recipe card for how you sound — one Claude keeps on file and follows automatically. Once it exists, Claude stops writing like a well-meaning intern and starts writing like you on a good day. That's the whole trick, and the setup takes about 15 minutes.

The old way to do this was digging through your sent folder and pasting emails into Claude one by one. Not anymore. You connect Claude to your Gmail once, and it reads your real sent emails directly — the whole lot, rambles and all. Five minutes, mostly clicking "allow".

This is the step that makes everything else work, so don't skip it. One prompt does the whole job: Claude reads your last 50 sent emails, works out exactly how you write, studies what makes AI writing sound like AI, builds your personal banned list — and packages the lot into a reusable skill called my-email-voice that you invoke in any future chat. Build it once, use it forever.

This is the main event. Your my-email-voice skill is saved, so all you bring now is what's happening this month — and Claude drafts every email you'll send: weekly value emails, a promo sequence for whatever you're selling, and a re-engagement note for the quiet ones on your list.

A few minutes later you're looking at your entire month: subject lines, drafts, the promo arc, the lot. The [YOUR STORY HERE] placeholders are deliberate — Claude flags where a personal story belongs instead of making one up. You drop in the real thing during the edit. Your stories stay yours; Claude just builds the scaffolding around them.

Real talk: the first drafts won't be perfect. Mine weren't — I changed maybe two lines per email. But changing two lines is editing, and editing is a completely different job to staring at a blank page every Tuesday night. Claude does the 80%, you do the 20% that makes it unmistakably yours.

my-email-voice is built for one job: your emails, in your voice. This one's the general-purpose cousin — paste ANY text at it (a caption, a bio, a proposal, that thing ChatGPT wrote for you last year) and it strips the AI tells out. Same rulebook as before: Wikipedia editors' own field guide for spotting AI writing, no Gmail access needed.

How the two fit together: run ai-humanizer over anything, run my-email-voice when it's an email that has to sound like you.

Here's everything this setup needs — and everything it doesn't. Spoiler: the list on the right is why you haven't done this already, and none of it is actually required.

Your order of operations: connect Gmail today (section 2, five minutes), run the skill-builder prompt (section 3) and save my-email-voice, then run the batch prompt (section 4) whenever your next email is due. Do the 20% pass, schedule everything in whatever platform you already use, and close the laptop. See you next month.