agentclaw

Workflow: email triage

Your shared inbox is a full-time job nobody was hired for

Every message in support@ or info@ gets read by a human, judged by a human, forwarded by a human. The reading is cheap. The deciding, routing, and chasing is where the hours go — and the dropped threads are where the money goes.

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The manual version

Where the time actually goes

Watch someone work a shared inbox for an hour and the pattern is obvious. Opening and reading each message takes seconds. Everything after that is the real cost.

Each email forces a chain of small decisions: who owns this, is it urgent, has someone already replied, what do we say. None of those decisions is hard. All of them interrupt whatever the person was actually hired to do. Add up your own numbers: messages per day, times a few minutes of deciding and forwarding each, times whoever's salary is doing it.

  • Classification: reading a message just to figure out what it is — order issue, billing question, vendor invoice, junk
  • Routing: forwarding to the right person, then re-forwarding when it bounces back with "not mine"
  • Drafting: writing the same six replies over and over with the names swapped
  • Chasing: checking whether the thing you forwarded on Tuesday ever got answered
  • The drops: threads nobody catches until the customer follows up, annoyed
agentclaw · workflow run

$ claw run invoice-intake

→ 47 documents queued

→ extracted · matched · posted

✓ done in 3m 12s · 0 exceptions escalated

The automated version

Classified, routed, drafted — before anyone opens the inbox

An email triage agent sits on the shared inbox and does the deciding, not just the filtering. Here is the whole loop.

  1. 01

    Every message gets read and classified

    The agent reads the full email and its attachments, not just the subject line. It extracts who sent it, what they want, how urgent it is, and any account, order, or invoice numbers mentioned. Then it assigns one of your categories: billing, support, sales, vendor, junk. Keyword filters guess. This reads.

  2. 02

    Routing follows your rules, with a paper trail

    Each category maps to an owner or a queue you defined. Messages that smell like a complaint, a legal issue, or a big account escalate straight to a human. Every message gets tagged and logged, so you can see exactly what went where and why — no more archaeology in the forwarding chain.

  3. 03

    Replies arrive as drafts, and nothing goes stale

    For routine categories, the agent writes a draft reply using your real templates and the data it pulled — the customer's order status, the invoice in question. A human reviews and sends. Anything sitting unanswered past a threshold you set gets flagged, so no thread dies silently.

Signs it's time to automate this

You don't need all six. Two or three means the inbox is already costing more than it looks.

  • A shared inbox gets 50+ messages a day and no single person owns it
  • Customers sometimes get two different replies to the same email — or none
  • Your best operations person spends the first hour of every day forwarding mail
  • "Did anyone answer that?" is a recurring question in your Slack
  • The same ten questions make up most of the inbox, and the answers rarely change
  • You've found a week-old unanswered customer message, and it wasn't the first time

Straight answers

Can I do this myself?+

The basic version, yes. Gmail and Outlook rules plus a bit of discipline will sort a low-volume inbox, and our free AI email triage workflow walks you through a workable setup with off-the-shelf tools. Where DIY breaks: high volume, messages that don't match keywords, drafting replies that need data from your other systems, and the ongoing maintenance nobody gets around to. If your inbox is a side task, DIY it. If it's eating a person, that's what we build.

Will it send emails without a human seeing them?+

Not unless you tell it to. The default is drafts-for-approval: the agent writes, a person sends. Once you've watched it perform on a category for a while, you can choose to let specific low-risk replies go out automatically. That's your call, made category by category, and reversible.

What happens to emails it can't classify?+

They land in a human review queue, flagged as unclassified. The agent never guesses silently and never deletes. Those misses are also how the system gets better: we review them, tighten the rules, and the unclassified pile shrinks over time. You always see what fell through.

What does this cost?+

Our engagements start at $5,000/month, and email triage is usually one of several workflows we run inside that. Whether it's worth it is your math: hours spent working the inbox per week, times the loaded cost of the people doing it, plus whatever a dropped customer thread costs you. If the number doesn't clear the bar yet, start with our free resources — they're genuinely free.

Keep going

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Carrier mail, client questions, and renewal notices — triage is half the job.

Workflow automation services

How we scope, build, and run automations like this one.

Free AI email triage workflow

The DIY version, if you want to start there.

Find out what your inbox actually costs

Book a free AI opportunity audit. We'll map your shared inboxes, count what's routable, and tell you honestly whether triage is worth automating for your volume.

Book your free audit

We take on companies ready to invest $5,000+/month. Not there yet? Our free resources are genuinely free.