Inbox Triage Agent

A shared inbox is where work goes to wait, because sorting it is nobody's job in particular. This agent reads each new email, applies the label from your rules, and forwards it to the owner with two lines of context on top. Slack fires only for what you defined as urgent, so a ping in that channel still means something.

What people use it for

• A legal inbox with owners - Legal teams handling hundreds of emails a week have cut request management time by around 80 percent by sorting on arrival. Contracts, subpoenas, and vendor questions reach the right lawyer without a triage meeting.
• Operations and finance mail - Invoices, supplier forms, and access requests get their label and go to the person who processes them. Nobody spends the first half hour of the day forwarding mail by hand.
• People and HR requests - Sick notes, leave requests, and manager questions are routed to the single owner you named and never announced in a channel. Personal detail stays out of Slack by rule, not by luck.
• Nothing urgent gets buried - An outage report or a hard deadline pings Slack the minute it lands, with the label, the ask, and who it went to. Everything else is handled in silence.

Before you fork

What do I need to connect before it runs?

A Gmail account for the shared inbox, with the labels already created under the exact names you use in the rules, and the Slack channel for urgent items. Then you write the routing rules, one line per category with its label and its owner's email address, plus what counts as urgent. Everything the agent does comes from that list, so it is worth spending twenty minutes on.

What happens when it gets a label wrong?

It can only label and forward, so a mistake is a misfiled email, not a lost or answered one. It cannot reply to the sender, delete, or archive, and it will not forward to an address outside your rules. When nothing fits it applies your fallback label and says plainly that it could not classify the email, which is far easier to fix than a confident wrong route. Run it alongside your current process for a week and read the labels before you trust the forwards.

What does it cost to run?

One short agent run per email the trigger picks up, so cost follows inbox volume. Urgent items cost the same as routine ones, since the Slack post is the cheap part. If the inbox is full of automated notifications, filter the trigger to the mail you actually want triaged.