I Benchmarked 10 AI Models for Email Triage — A Free Local Model Won

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

This post was written with AI assistance (Claude) for structure and formatting. The analysis, opinions, and surprise at the results are entirely my own.

I built an email triage system that reads incoming mail and classifies it into categories: BULK, ACTION, BILLING, MONITOR, JUNK, and PERSONAL. Each email gets a category, a confidence score, and a one-line reason. The system then labels or files the email accordingly.

I expected an expensive cloud model to win.

Benchmark on Mike's Shiny Objects

I Benchmarked 10 AI Models for Email Triage — A Free Local Model Won