AI services · Inbox Triage

Your shared inbox, sorted and answered by 8am

Inbox Triage watches enquiries@, info@ or your own mailbox, stops the junk before any AI sees it, sorts the rest into your buckets, drafts the replies that need one in your own voice, and sends you one summary at 8am. It never sends anything itself.

It runs against the mailbox you already have. Nothing moves to a new system, nobody learns a new app, and the only thing that changes is what you find when you open the inbox: the junk gone, the rest sorted, and a draft waiting under every email that needs an answer.

It is a small, metered service built and run by us in Scarborough. We set it up with you, it runs on our server, and you can switch it off from a settings page the moment you want to.

Drafts only. Every reply it writes lands in your Drafts folder for you to read, change and send. It has no way to send an email, and we have no plan to give it one.

The 9am inbox

A shared inbox is where good businesses quietly lose customers. The enquiry that arrived on Thursday night gets answered on Monday. The quote request sits two screens down under a run of newsletters. The one message that was actually urgent looks exactly like the forty that were not. Nobody is lazy; there is just too much of it, and all of it looks the same until someone has read it.

The fix is not another app to check. It is for the sorting and the first draft to be done before you sit down, so the half hour you spend on email is spent deciding and sending, not reading and sighing.

What happens to an email

Four steps, every email, every minute of the day.

  1. 1

    Stopped before any AI

    Spam, newsletters, bounces and auto-replies are caught by plain rules first and never reach the model. You choose how strict that is, and whether they are left where they are, flagged, moved to Junk, or sent to Deleted Items.

  2. 2

    Sorted into your buckets

    Everything else is read and put into one of your buckets: new enquiry, existing customer, supplier, booking, complaint, whatever your mail actually contains. You write the one-line description of each bucket; we draw the first set from a week of your real mail.

  3. 3

    Drafted in your voice

    Buckets you mark "draft a reply" get one, written from your one-pager and your own past replies. Anything the drafter does not know for certain is left in square brackets for you to fill in, so it never invents a price or a date.

  4. 4

    Listed in the morning summary

    At 8am one email tells you what came in, what was stopped, what needs you, and which drafts are waiting. Urgent items are flagged in the inbox as they arrive, so you are not waiting for the summary to find out.

A real draft, as it lands in Drafts

This is what the public demo wrote for a sample enquiry from a guest house asking for a website quote. The square brackets are the point: the drafter did not know the price or the timescale, so it asked for them instead of making them up.

Hi Jo,

Thanks for getting in touch, and a website that doesn't work on phones is definitely worth fixing. We'd be glad to help with a simple, easy-to-update site with an online booking button.

We can't give a cost or timescale until we know a little more, so it would help if you could tell us: the address of your current website; roughly how many rooms you have; whether you already use a booking system, or would like us to suggest one; and the date you'd like the new site live by for Easter.

Once we have those, a colleague will confirm a rough cost and whether your timing is achievable. [confirm rough cost] [confirm timescale and whether it can be done before Easter]

Kind regards

Metered, not guessed. That draft cost 0.7p of AI. Across our own mailboxes the average is 0.7p for an email that gets a draft and 0.1p for one that is only sorted, from the meter on every email we process.

What you control

All of it from one settings page in your Eightlegged account. Changes take effect on the next poll, within a minute.

Buckets

Add, rename or remove them; write the one-line description the sorter reads; choose which buckets get a draft and whether any are moved to a folder of their own.

Spam and newsletters

Relaxed, balanced or strict. Then what happens to them: leave, flag, move to Junk, or Deleted Items. Nothing is ever permanently deleted by the service.

Risky attachments

Emails carrying attachment types that are usually trouble (executables, scripts, macro documents) can be flagged or moved to a quarantine folder. It judges by type and name; it is not virus scanning.

Flags

Flag urgent emails, flag the ones that need a reply, or neither. Flags only apply to mail that stays in the inbox.

Allow and block lists

Addresses and domains that always get through, and ones that never do. Your accountant is never spam; that one persistent SEO salesman always is.

Your voice

We pull your last thirty real replies from Sent Items. You switch off any you would not want copied and paste in one you are proud of. The drafter writes from those, refreshed monthly.

The morning summary

One email, 8am, your mailbox. A sample of what a Tuesday looks like.

Overnight: 23 emails. 14 were stopped before any AI: 11 spam, 2 newsletters, 1 bounce. All moved to Junk as you asked.

Needs you: 4. Two new enquiries (drafts waiting), one existing customer asking about a delivery date (draft waiting), one complaint flagged urgent at 06:40 (draft waiting, please read it first).

For information: 5. Two booking confirmations, two supplier invoices, one newsletter you have allow-listed.

This month so far: 412 emails, 61 drafts, £0.52 of AI.

The summary goes to as many people as you like. A team can have one shared summary; a sole trader gets it on their phone with the first coffee.

What it costs

Every plan has every feature. Plans differ by how many mailboxes and how much mail. Set-up is £150 on Starter and Business and £250 on Team and Enterprise, and covers the buckets, the one-pager, your voice and a week of dry runs before anything is switched on.

Starter

£49
a month
  • 1 mailbox
  • Up to 500 emails a month
  • Up to 60 drafts a month
  • Morning summary, settings page, pause

Business

£99
a month
  • 3 mailboxes
  • Up to 2,000 emails a month
  • Up to 250 drafts a month
  • Morning summary to anyone you name

Team

£199
a month
  • 10 mailboxes
  • Up to 6,000 emails a month
  • Drafts within fair use
  • One summary for the whole team

Enterprise

£499
a month
  • 50 mailboxes, then £8 each
  • Up to 30,000 emails a month
  • Drafts within fair use
  • A conversation about what else you need

The AI underneath costs about a penny per drafted email at today's rates, and that is included in the price. Each mailbox has a daily limit and each plan a monthly cap, so a spam storm cannot run up a bill.

What it does not do

Send an email. Drafts go to your Drafts folder; a person presses send.
Open or read attachments. It judges them by type and name only.
Scan for viruses. Keep your antivirus; this is not that.
Permanently delete anything. "Delete" means your Deleted Items folder.
Invent facts. Anything it does not know is left in square brackets.
Act on anything you have not switched on.

Security and your data

Where it runs. The service runs on our own server in the UK, the same one that hosts our customers' websites. It connects to your mailbox over an encrypted IMAP connection with a password or app password you give us, stored encrypted; the key that unlocks it lives on the server, not in the database.

What the model sees. The text of each email is sent to Anthropic's Claude API over an encrypted connection to be sorted and, where you have asked for it, drafted. Under Anthropic's commercial terms that text is not used to train their models. Their servers are in the United States, which we state plainly because some customers need to know it.

What we keep. A log of each email's sender, subject, bucket, summary and draft, with the tokens and cost, so you can see exactly what it did and what it cost. The email itself stays in your mailbox and is never copied anywhere else by us.

The one-pager is the only source of facts. The drafter writes from your one-pager (what you do, your hours, what you never promise by email) and your own past replies. It cannot look anything else up, which is exactly why it leaves brackets rather than guessing.

The demo at /ai/try/ keeps the verdict and the draft so we can improve it, and does not keep the email you pasted.

Questions people ask before they start

Does it send emails?+
No, and it cannot. Every reply it writes is saved to your Drafts folder. You open it, change what you like and press send yourself. The morning summary is the only email the service sends, and that goes to you.
Which mailboxes work?+
Any mailbox we can reach over IMAP with a password or an app password: mail we host for you, Gmail, Yahoo, and most other hosting companies' mail. Microsoft 365 mailboxes connect differently, so if that is you, talk to us first and we will tell you honestly where we are with it.
Why does Yahoo or Gmail need an app password?+
Because both refuse ordinary passwords from anything that is not their own app. An app password is a second password you create in your account settings just for this; it can be revoked on its own at any time without changing your real one. We walk you through it in five minutes.
What about spam and viruses?+
Spam, newsletters and bounces are caught by plain rules before any AI reads them, and you set how strict that is and what happens to them. Risky attachments are judged by their type and name and can be flagged or quarantined. It is not virus scanning: keep your antivirus running exactly as you do now.
Can it learn how I write?+
Yes. At set-up we pull your last thirty real replies from Sent Items, quotes included, which is how it learns how you price and how you say no. You switch off any you would not want copied and can paste in one you are proud of. The drafter writes from the newest thirty you have left on.
What if it gets one wrong?+
Nothing was sent, so nothing has happened. A draft you do not like is one you do not send. An email in the wrong bucket is a one-line fix to that bucket's description on your settings page, and everything it did is in the log, so we can see why.
How long does set-up take?+
A short conversation and a mailbox password. We draw the first buckets from a week of your real mail, write the one-pager with you, pull your voice from Sent Items and run dry runs until a week of mail looks right. Only then is it switched on.
Can I switch it off?+
Yes, from your settings page, and it stops at the next poll within a minute. Pause keeps everything ready for when you come back; removing a mailbox deletes its password from our side.

Forty seconds on it

Monday, 8am, 47 emails, four that mattered. The clip we made about the shared-inbox problem and what the triage does with it.

See it work before you talk to anyone

Paste an email your business has received and watch it sort, decide and draft. Three goes a day, nothing sent, nothing kept.