Course contentModule 2 · Lesson 7
Module 2 · Lesson 7
Email Inbox Triage
Build a helper that sorts incoming emails, estimates their urgency, and drafts a first reply for you to review.
MODULE 2 / USE-CASE MENU
Who it is for. You are self-employed and your inbox eats the first hour of every morning.
Goal / Outcome. At the end you have a helper: you paste an incoming email into it, and it sorts the message, estimates urgency, and drafts a first reply you only need to review and send.
Recommended tool. App builder (Lovable or Bolt) that can connect to an AI model. Current as of now, verify yourself.
The smallest good starting point is not a real inbox integration. Start with copy-and-paste into a text field. That way you avoid OAuth, provider permissions, and the question of whether your tool is allowed to read someone else's mail. Only once sorting works well on ten real examples does automating the connection become worth it.
What matters most is the boundary between suggesting and sending. The helper may prepare a reply, but it must not send it on its own. With customer emails especially, you always want to be the final reviewer: tone, commitments, pricing, deadlines, and personal data all need one pass through your own eyes before anything goes out.
Build me a helper that assists me in sorting my emails.
I paste the text of an incoming email into a field.
The helper should give me three things:
a category (Customer, Invoice, Newsletter, Other),
an urgency level (high, medium, low),
and a short, polite draft reply in English.
I want to be able to edit the draft before I copy it.
Clean and clear, everything on one page.
Done and reliable. Run CHECK-3.1-B and verify with real example emails that the categories and drafts actually match, rather than just assuming they do. Once this incurs AI model costs, use CHECK-3.3-B to set a hard spending cap in your dashboard. And keep in mind from 3.5: no real email content with other people's names should end up in prompts or logs without their knowledge.