Inbox and lead routing
An inbox briefing that cannot send mail
An agentic employee reads the owner inbox every morning and returns a short briefing split into internal and external, filtering out newsletters and job-board noise, with a stated disposition per thread. It can read and it can draft. It has no ability to send, archive, or delete.
- Who it is for
- Owners and executives whose inbox is the real operating system of the business, and who have been told to trust an AI with it and correctly refused.
- Deployed for
- The owner of CertaPro of Grand Haven and CertaPro of Kalamazoo, running on Microsoft Outlook.
- Status
- Live deployment
The goal
Answer one question before the day starts: what actually needs me today, and what is just noise wearing a subject line.
Split the inbox into internal colleagues and external customers, prospects, vendors and partners, because those two piles need different attention and get mixed together by every mail client ever built.
Produce something that can be read aloud in under two minutes. A briefing nobody reads is not a briefing.
Do all of that without ever gaining the power to send mail on the owner behalf.
Cost, against the human alternative
Triage is one skill on a deployment, not a deployment of its own. On a Prospectr Agentic Employee Core deployment at $10,000, or Sovereign at $25,000, this is the kind of skill built inside the included development hours.
Anchor title: Executive Assistant doing first-pass triage on an owner inbox. Typical fully-loaded cost is $70,000 to $85,000 a year once payroll tax, benefits, paid time off, ramp time, and turnover are counted. That is a market range for the title, not a quote of anyone actual salary. The goal is not to replace that person. It is to put them in their most productive role. The 6am sort of two hundred subject lines is not the reason you hired an assistant. Handing the sort to an agent gives that person back the calendar, the client relationships, and the follow-through that only a human can carry.
The interesting cost is not the build. It is the cost of the lead that died in an inbox because it arrived on a busy Thursday.
Triage is also the cheapest possible skill to run, because most of it is filtering, and filtering does not require an expensive model.
The goal is not to replace humans. It is to put them in their most productive role. Nobody gets cut here. Your billing manager stops doing data entry and starts working collections. Your GM stops chasing paperwork and starts selling. The agent absorbs the repetitive half of a job so the person keeps the half that actually needs a person.
This is a typical fully-loaded annual range for that title, meaning base pay plus payroll tax, benefits, paid time off, ramp time before the person is productive, and the cost of refilling the seat when they leave. It is a market range for the role, not a quote of anyone actual salary.
Security
- The send, archive, delete, move, and mark-as-read capabilities are not disabled by a setting. They are absent from the code, and an allowlist raises an error if anything attempts them.
- Archive-rule matches are held for human review and reported. Nothing is auto-archived.
- Exactly one autonomous send exists, authorized in writing by the owner, and it is narrow by construction: a forward to one hardcoded recipient, triggered only by one specific sender domain. Both conditions are checked, the recipient is not a parameter, and every forward is logged.
- Every other outbound message is a draft. A human presses send.
Output
- A daily briefing, split internal and external, in a direct chief-of-staff voice with no preamble.
- Per thread: sender, subject, age, one line on what they actually want, and a disposition of reply needed, decision, informational, or waiting on someone else.
- A closing call on the top three items that need the owner today.
- Optional reply drafts sitting in the mail client, ready for a human to review and send.
Ongoing cost to maintain
- Runs on a schedule. The filtering work is deterministic and cheap. The summarizing work is the only part that consumes paid model inference, and it is bounded by the number of genuine threads rather than by total inbox volume.
- No per-seat licensing. The cost does not grow because you hired someone.
The framework that keeps it safe and keeps it cheap
- Drafts only, as an architectural property rather than a policy promise. The distinction matters. A policy can be overridden by a confused model. An absent function cannot be called.
- Every exception to drafts-only is written down verbatim, with the date and the person who authorized it, in the procedure document.
- The procedure document is the source of truth and the owner can edit it. The machine copy regenerates from the document, and a divergence is detected and quarantined rather than silently overwritten.
- It runs in your cloud, on your mail account, with your data staying in your tenancy.
The procedures behind this
Each of these is a written document with a plain-English section for a person, a machine-readable section for the agent, and a dated changelog.
- troy-inbox-triage
- inbox-morning-triage
- email-triage
- gmail-inbox-agent
- microsoft-inbox-agent
Where every claim on this page comes from
- Drafts-only guarantee, the absent-function design, the held-for-review archive behavior, and the single narrow forward exception are all documented in the canonical Troy Inbox Triage skill document, version 1.0 dated 2026-08-14, status live.
- The forward exception carries the authorizing quote from the owner, verbatim and dated, in that same document.
- Divergence detection between the canonical document and the on-disk copy was built and verified end to end on 2026-08-18, per AGENTS.md.
- Pricing figures are Prospectr published pricing, live at /pricing.
Questions people ask about this
Can this AI send email as me?
No. Sending, archiving, deleting, moving and marking as read are not present in the code at all. It can read, and it can create a draft. There is one deliberate exception, a forward to a single hardcoded internal recipient triggered by a single sender domain, which was authorized in writing by the owner and is logged every time it fires.
How is that different from a setting I could turn off?
A setting is a promise the software makes and can break. An absent function cannot be called by a confused model, a bad prompt, or someone who gained access to the config. We build the guarantee into the shape of the system rather than into its configuration.
Does it read every email in my inbox?
It reads the inbox in order to filter it. It reports only mail genuinely addressed to you, dropping newsletters, marketing blasts, job-board noise and system notifications. Your mail stays in your tenancy on your infrastructure.
What does the briefing actually look like?
Short. Sender, subject, age, one line on what they want, and a disposition. Then the top three that need you today. It is written to be read aloud, which is the constraint that keeps it honest.
Is there a version of this in your business?
The discovery call is a working conversation, not a demo. Bring the process that annoys you most.