Email Intelligence Pipeline

The Problem

A marketing agency was spending 4 hours every day manually triaging their shared inbox. Important client requests sat unread while low-priority newsletters received attention first. The team lacked a consistent way to prioritize, and high-stakes emails were routinely delayed by hours.

As the inbox volume scaled with the agency's growth, the bottleneck was becoming unsustainable. They needed a system that could read, understand, and act on emails without constant human oversight.

The Solution

I built a fully automated triage pipeline using n8n as the orchestration layer. Every incoming email is pulled via the Gmail API, passed to Claude AI for classification and action-item extraction, then routed to the appropriate Slack channel based on priority. All decisions are logged to Airtable for review and audit.

• Gmail API polls the inbox every 5 minutes and fetches new messages
• Claude AI reads each email, assigns a priority level (urgent / normal / low), and extracts any required action items
• A priority router sends urgent items to a dedicated Slack channel with a summary and suggested response
• All classifications and metadata are logged to Airtable for weekly review and accuracy tracking
• Edge cases (ambiguous priority, unknown senders) are flagged for a single daily human review instead of blocking the queue

Pipeline

The Results

Within two weeks of deployment, email processing time dropped from 4 hours to 20 minutes per day. The 20-minute window is now a focused review of edge cases and AI-drafted responses — not a full triage exercise.

• 95% classification accuracy measured over the first 3 months of operation
• Zero missed high-priority emails since go-live
• 450+ emails processed monthly with no manual intervention
• Team reports significantly lower stress around inbox management