When to use
Use this when the owner is the router — every email gets a glance, half of them are bills or noise, and the real customer threads drown.
Prerequisites
- One mailbox that is actually the bottleneck (owner or shared ops inbox)
- A short label list: bill, lead, customer, vendor, noise
- A human who will send or discard drafts for the first two weeks
SKILL.md
First half on the page. The rest is one click — no email. Crawlers get the full file either way.
--- name: inbox-triage description: Classify a bottleneck inbox, file noise, route bills and leads, and draft customer replies. Never send, never archive unsure, never delete. --- # Inbox triage ## Flow 1. Read new unread messages in the bottleneck mailbox. 2. Classify: bill | lead | customer | vendor | noise | unsure. 3. Noise: label and archive. 4. Bill: label and hand to accounts-payable-capture (do not pay). 5. Lead: label and hand to inbound-follow-up (do not send). 6. Customer / vendor: draft a reply from the thread. Leave the draft in the mailbox or a side queue. Do not send. 7. Unsure: leave unread at the top. Do not guess. ## Draft rules - Quote the question you're answering. - Don't promise dates, refunds, or "I'll have this today" unless that sentence is already in a saved reply the owner approved. - If the thread is angry, draft nothing — flag for the owner. ## Safeguards - Never send. - Never delete. - Never archive "unsure." - Never forward a customer thread to an external LLM tool that isn't in the approved list. - Never change calendar, CRM, or books from this skill. Route, don't act. ## Example morning pass ``` 32 new - 11 noise archived - 6 bills → AP queue - 3 leads → inbound drafts - 8 customer drafts queued - 4 unsure left unread 0 sent ``` ## Add it to your agent Read this file and follow the instructions. Run on yesterday's mailbox as a report (what would have happened) before you let it label live mail.
Still ungated. Page stays short until you ask.
Common questions
Will this auto-reply to customers?
No. Drafts only. Auto-reply is how you get a confident wrong answer at 2am.
What about a chatbot on the website?
Different job. The website bot is a front door with a handoff. This skill is the existing inbox. Don't mash them together on day one.