What it is

Most teams lose the first hour of every day just sorting the inbox — deciding what's urgent, what's a client, what can wait. This system does that sorting before anyone sits down. On a schedule, it pulls every new, unhandled email, cleans it up, and checks the sender against your own contact list so it knows a client from a supplier from a stranger.

Then it categorizes each email by your rules — the ones you define, not generic labels — and flags the ones that need action as high importance. Your team opens Outlook to an inbox that's already triaged, with the emails that matter already at the top.

How the flow runs

The rules, categories, and contact list are all yours — the AI just applies them consistently to every email.

What it handles

• Rule-based categorizing using categories and rules you define, not fixed generic ones.
• Contact-aware sorting — it knows your clients and suppliers by checking the sender against your CRM.
• Importance flagging so emails that need action are marked high-priority automatically.
• Skips what's handled — already-flagged or already-categorized emails are left alone.
• Runs on a schedule, sweeping the inbox every few minutes with no one watching.

Architecture & stack

• Orchestration: n8n Cloud, on a recurring schedule against your Outlook inbox.
• Reasoning: OpenAI GPT-4o for categorizing and prioritizing each email.
• Rules & contacts: Airtable holds your categories, rules, and contact list; synced from your CRM (Monday.com in this build).
• Reliability: filters to skip handled mail, plus retry-on-fail and error alerting.

What the client gets

The daily inbox triage stops being a person's job. Client emails surface immediately, low-priority noise is sorted out of the way, and the rules stay exactly as you set them. It runs inside your own Microsoft 365 account — connect your CRM, define your categories, and it takes over from there.