Could've Been an Email: The Email Test for Meetings

Inspiration

Every week, millions of professionals sit through meetings that could have easily been a two-sentence email. We have all experienced the pain of sitting on a call with a dozen people, having no clear agenda, and listening to a leader who should have just sent a Slack message. We wanted to put a concrete dollar amount on that wasted time and give teams a tool to stop unnecessary meetings before they ever hit the calendar, predicting the true usefulness of the meeting before it even happens.

What it does

TheEmailTest analyzes and predicts your meeting before it even happens. You simply upload a CSV with the meeting time and agenda, your attendees, their salaries, as well as ics files of the attendees' calendars exported from Google Calendar. Claude uses this data to predict whether the ROI on the meeting is worth it or if it should've been an email instead. Our app calculates the real dollar cost of the meeting based on the attendees' salaries converted to hourly rates, judges the meeting ROI on a four-tier scale (ranging from Worth It to Calendar Crime (don't even email)), and tells you exactly who actually needs to be there. It also suggests a tighter agenda and a better time slot. From there, it takes just one click to schedule the improved meeting directly to Google Calendar.

How we built it

We built the frontend of TheEmailTest using React and Vite, supported by an Express proxy server on the backend to handle Claude API calls securely. To process our custom two-section CSV format, we used PapaParse, while the iCalendar standard helped us parse attendee availability from .ics files.

Claude (specifically claude-sonnet-4-20250514) does the heavy lifting. It analyzes the meeting context, calculates the ROI, trims down the attendee list, and rewrites the agenda. Finally, Google Calendar OAuth handles the actual scheduling step.

Challenges we ran into

We hit a roadblock with CORS restrictions between the browser and the Anthropic API, which forced us to spin up a lightweight Express proxy server. Parsing .ics calendar files and accurately matching them to attendees by filename across our non-standard CSV format also took some very careful handling.

Plus, getting Google Calendar OAuth working locally was much more involved than we anticipated for a short hackathon build. Navigating the consent screen, setting up test users, and dealing with API key restrictions definitely tested our patience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud that the core experience works flawlessly from end to end. You can upload your files, get a real AI-powered verdict complete with a dollar cost, and push a better version of the meeting straight to Google Calendar with a single click.

The four-tier verdict system, combined with Claude's natural language explanations, feels genuinely useful rather than just a fun gimmick.

What we learned

We learned just how powerful Claude is for structured reasoning tasks. It is fantastic at analyzing context, making smart judgment calls about who actually belongs in a meeting, and rewriting agendas using real business logic instead of just generating standard text. We also learned the hard way that setting up Google OAuth takes up a ton of time.

What's next for TheEmailTest

Our immediate next step is building direct Google Calendar integration to pull attendee schedules automatically, removing the need for manual .ics uploads. We also want to add a Slack integration to send the meeting verdict and suggested agenda directly into a team channel.

Down the road, we plan to build a recurring meeting audit feature that scans an entire calendar and flags every meeting that stinks of corporate procrastination.