Nurho / automation engineering
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Workflows

Inbox Triage

Ep 06 · Gmail · AI · Slack

The average owner spends about 11 hours a week on email, and the message worth money is always the one buried deepest.

Leads, invoices, support requests, and spam all land in the same pile, and the pile decides your morning. Somewhere in there is a customer ready to spend money, aging quietly under a newsletter.

What it does

Every new email gets read by AI and labeled: lead, invoice, support, or junk. If it is a lead, the workflow goes one step further and writes a reply in your tone, then parks it in your drafts folder and pings your phone. You wake up to a sorted inbox and answers that are already written, waiting for your eyes and your send button.

That last part is a design decision, not a limitation. Auto-sending replies to strangers is how businesses end up apologizing on social media. The robot drafts, the human sends.

How it works

A Gmail trigger fires on each new message. The AI step returns a category, a confidence score, and, for leads, a drafted reply. Labels get applied, the draft attaches to the thread, and Slack gets the ping. Anything the classifier is unsure about defaults to the support label rather than guessing, so weird emails fail safe instead of failing weird.

Setup

  1. Import the workflow file into your n8n instance.
  2. Create the four Gmail labels (Lead, Invoice, Support, Junk-ish) or rename the ones in the workflow.
  3. Connect an AI provider key and describe your business in the two-line prompt so the classifier knows what a lead looks like.
  4. Connect Slack (or swap for SMS) for the new-lead ping.
  5. Send yourself three test emails and check the labels and the drafted reply.

The template runs on n8n, any recent version, cloud or self-hosted. Every place that needs one of your accounts is marked with a note inside the workflow.

Get the workflow

The file arrives by email. No newsletter, no drip sequence: at most an occasional note when a workflow you grabbed gets an important fix. See privacy.

Rather have this running in your business without touching a single node? That is the actual job. Write to hello@nurho.net or start with the ROI calculator to see if it is even worth automating.

Nurho / automation engineering

Production-grade automation, built by an engineer. Helsinki-based, working with clients across the US, UK & Europe.

Nurho · Helsinki, Finland
hello@nurho.net

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