We ran a day of email for a made-up seaside guest house through our Inbox Triage service, and put the whole thing on our website: every email that came in, the summary it wrote, and the replies it drafted.
Most small businesses run on one shared inbox. Bookings, suppliers, complaints, invoices and spam all land in the same place, and someone has to open every one of them to find the few that matter. Inbox Triage reads that inbox overnight and sends one email at 8am: what needs a reply, what doesn't, and drafts of the replies.
It's easy to describe and hard to believe, so we built a demo you can look through rather than take our word for.
What we put through it
Merrowby Steps is invented: the guest house, its town, and everyone who writes in. The addresses use a reserved domain and the phone numbers come from the ranges kept for TV drama, so nobody real is involved. What isn't invented is the processing. It's the engine's own output from one run on 12 October 2026, unedited, through the same rules, sorting, drafting and summary that run on our customers' inboxes.
Forty emails arrived between one 8am summary and the next:
- 10 were stopped by the rules before any AI saw them: spam, newsletters, auto-replies.
- 30 were read and sorted into the guest house's own folders: bookings, suppliers, complaints, accounts.
- 7 needed a reply, and three of those were urgent: a supplier whose ironer had broken, a guest asking for a refund, and a guest who had left her glasses and a hearing-aid charger in Room 3.
- 6 replies were drafted and left in the Drafts folder. The seventh was a staff note, which didn't need a reply.
- The AI cost about 8p for the lot.
The summary
The one email Inbox Triage sends each day lists the seven that need a reply, urgent first, each in a line. Below that is a tally of everything else (six accounts emails, five from the booking system, four spam, three suppliers with the invoice amounts and delivery days pulled out) so nothing is hidden, just out of the way.
Our rough sum, with the assumptions written on the page: about 40 minutes to open and decide on 40 emails by hand, against about 9 minutes to read the summary and deal with the seven. That's half an hour back on an ordinary morning, before counting the replies already drafted.
What it doesn't do
It never sends anything. Every draft waits for a person to read it, change what needs changing and press send. It doesn't delete mail either: it files it. If it sorts something wrongly, you reply to the summary and we tune it.
See it, then try it
The whole morning is on our website: each email opens to show what the triage decided and why, and the drafts sit beside the emails they answer. There's also a box to paste one of your own emails and see what it would do with it.
See the sample inbox · How Inbox Triage works
Inbox Triage is from £49 a month. If your team starts each day digging through one inbox, get in touch.
Want something like this for your business? We're in Scarborough - websites start at £49.
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