Automatic email sorting
A hundred messages a day, ten of which actually want something from you. The rest is noise you have to dig through every morning.
What can be sorted on its own
Anything with a repeating pattern:
- orders and confirmations from portals
- invoices and accounting documents
- notifications from systems, banks and tools
- enquiries from the form on your website
- newsletters and marketing
This is not an ordinary filter on the sender. The system reads the content, recognises what the message is about, and sends it where it belongs: it applies a label and, on some matters, leaves a draft reply ready for approval.
What cannot be sorted, and is better left alone
Complaints and difficult matters. A message from an annoyed customer looks like any other in the system, and costs the most. I mark those as urgent and leave them to a person.
One-off matters. If something arrives once a quarter and in a different format every time, the rule will get it wrong more often than it helps.
Decisions. The system will draft a reply, but a person should send it. At least until you have spent a few weeks checking it does not write nonsense.
How much of your inbox the automation sees
Only messages matching a filter we agree on beforehand. For example, only those from the booking portal. The rest of your correspondence does not exist for it.
You grant the access and revoke it whenever you like, with one click in your Google settings. Your mail does not end up on my server, because the automation runs on your account. If an AI model reads the content, it only gets the messages that passed the filter.
What it costs
Setup from 500 PLN, depending on how many categories have to be separated and how similar the emails are to one another.
I build it on what you already have. Usually Gmail or Google Workspace is enough; sometimes it is better to run it locally on your own machine. It depends on the project and on how you prefer to work.
What only shows up after launch
A rule that works for one person does not work for the whole company. The owner and the bookkeeper get completely different traffic on the same company inbox. Sorting built around one person starts losing the other one’s mail within a week.
The worst are not newsletters, but the “almost important” messages. You filter a newsletter out once and that is the end of it. The trouble comes from confirmations, reminders and automatic replies — they look like real messages, arrive every day, and they are what buries the one enquiry that matters.
A label beats moving to a folder. A moved email disappears from view and people stop trusting the system. A label leaves it where it was, just described — and after a week nobody checks any more whether the system got it wrong.
Where to start
By measuring how much time a day goes on working through your inbox. Under half an hour a day it usually does not pay back, and I will tell you that plainly.
If it comes to more, write two sentences about what exactly wears you down in that inbox. I reply within a day, and the first half hour of talking is free.