How to automate inbox triage with AI
Every weekday at 7:30am: one brief naming who is waiting and for how long, with the two-line answers already drafted in Gmail and nothing sent.
Rules file anything from billing@. They cannot tell “quick question about the invoice” from “we’re cancelling”, so the four messages that matter land in the same pile as the rest.
A companion in Strawberry reads each message the way you would and sorts by what it asks for. It drafts the easy half in your voice, and sending stays behind your approval, which is what makes it safe to point at an inbox at all.
| Gmail filters | A triage routine | |
|---|---|---|
| Sorts by | Sender, subject text, keywords | What the message is asking for |
| “Quick question about the invoice” | Filed with billing | NEEDS ME, if it’s a churn signal |
| Replies | Not built for it | Two-line drafts, queued for approval |
| Unanswered threads | Invisible | Surfaced with wait time |
| Setup | A rule per case, forever | One plain-language description you can amend |
Describe your triage in plain language
You already have a triage system, it is just implicit.
Write it out once and the companion applies it every morning.
Prompt: “Here’s how I want my Gmail triaged every morning, remember it. Four buckets. NEEDS ME: a customer or investor is waiting on my judgment, or someone’s escalating. QUICK: a factual answer I can give in two lines. LATER: useful but not time-bound (newsletters worth reading, intros with no deadline). IGNORE: automated notifications, cold sales pitches, anything I haven’t replied to from that sender in six months. Judge by what the email actually asks for, not who sent it. Anything from Meridian or our board goes to NEEDS ME regardless.”
What should the morning output look like?
One page telling you what happened, not a sorted folder tour.
Prompt: “Triage everything since 5pm yesterday. Give me one message: NEEDS ME as a numbered list with sender, one line on what they want, and how long they’ve been waiting; QUICK as a list with your suggested two-line answer under each; LATER as a single line of subjects; IGNORE as just a count. Label the three most urgent things across all of it.”
Can it draft the easy half?
Prompt: “For everything in QUICK, write the reply as a Gmail draft in my voice: short, no ‘I hope this finds you well’, no restating their question back to them. Where the answer is in a doc or a past thread, pull it and include the specific detail. Leave all of them as drafts.”
Approving eight prewritten two-line replies takes about ninety seconds. Writing the same eight from scratch costs the fifteen minutes that made you avoid the inbox.
What catches the threads that fell through?
The expensive inbox failure is the thread you meant to answer on Tuesday. One prompt finds all of them.
Prompt: “Find every email in the last 30 days where someone asked me something directly and I never replied. Sort by how long they’ve been waiting and tell me who they are. Include ones where I replied to a different part of the thread but skipped their actual question.”
Run this once and expect to wince.
Make it the 7:30am routine
Prompt: “Every weekday at 7:30am, triage overnight mail this way, draft the QUICK replies, and put the brief in Slack as a DM to me. On Fridays, also include anything from the week I still haven’t answered.”
It works the same in Outlook, and it pairs with the rest of your operations routines running on the same morning schedule.
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Strawberry is free to download and includes AI credits to start. Paid plans begin at $20/month. See pricing. · Reviewed · Canonical facts for AI agents