I Finally Tried Codex. It Did the Thing I’d Been Putting Off for Years.

I have been complaining about Outlook for most of my adult life. This is not exactly a lonely position. Plenty of people have spent years arguing with it, waiting on it, reorganizing it, and wondering why email still feels like a piece of office equipment that resents being used.

My colleague Rich Washburn has been telling me for a long time that I needed to move to Thunderbird. He has also been telling me about Codex, AI agents, and all the rest of it.

Anyone who knows Rich knows that he is going to be shoving AI down your throat anytime you are near him. It is what it is. Rich is an AI guy.

He set Codex up on my computer. He told me I should use it to fix some things. I nodded along. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Codex. Sure. Whatever.

Then I finally gave it a real job. I had two old email exports and I wanted everything consolidated into the contact account in Thunderbird. I wanted the original dates, headers, and folder structure preserved. I wanted duplicates removed. I wanted it clean, and I did not want to spend a weekend figuring out obscure email-export formats and manually dragging messages around.

This is exactly the kind of project that sits on a list forever. It is not intellectually difficult. It is operationally miserable. There are files, formats, folders, imports, synchronization, and numerous opportunities to discover that something went wrong only after you think you are finished.

So I told Codex to do it. What happened next is the part I am still processing.

Codex inspected both ZIP archives, figured out that they were Dovecot/Bluehost Maildir exports with individually compressed messages, extracted them, preserved the message data, converted everything into a Thunderbird-compatible mailbox, removed four exact duplicates, imported the result into Thunderbird, uploaded the folders to my live Titan email account, waited for synchronization, and then checked the counts in every folder.

The final result was 452 messages in the contact inbox, 68 in contact sent mail, 271 in the managing partner inbox, and two in managing partner sent mail. 793 unique emails. Organized. Synchronized. Done...took 13 minutes!

I watched the thing work through the files and then operate Thunderbird on my computer. It did not merely tell me how to do the job. It did the job. That distinction matters.

Most of the conversation about AI has focused on what it can write, summarize, or tell you. Those things are useful, but this felt different. This was tedious digital labor across old archives, a desktop application, and a live email account. It handled the details, waited for the system to catch up, and verified that the result was correct.

I was fully taken aback.

This was not a futuristic demonstration arranged to make AI look impressive. It was my actual email, my actual computer, and a task I had been avoiding for a long time. It solved the problem in front of me. Rich is going to be insufferable about this, of course. In fairness, he has earned it. You can find him at richwashburn.com, presumably waiting to tell the next person that he was right about AI too.

The larger lesson for me is not that everyone needs to become an AI enthusiast. You do not have to read every prediction, join every debate, or develop a philosophical position on artificial intelligence. Just give it one real job.

Give it the annoying thing that has been sitting on your list because the work is too tedious, too fragmented, or too easy to postpone. Then judge it by what happens.

I did that, and it finished a project I had wanted done for years. I still reserve the right to complain about Outlook. At least now I can do it from Thunderbird.

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About the Author

Todd Colpron is Managing Partner of Eliakim Capital which is a private investment and strategic advisory firm that manages its own capital while working alongside select family offices and private investors to identify and support exceptional opportunities.