Screen the mail first
Your automation gets every message that lands in your inbox. Most of them have nothing to do with the job. That is fine as long as you check the cheap things first. Sender, subject line, and whether a file is attached all cost you nothing to look at, because plain code reads them in a fraction of a second. Agent judgment costs real money and takes real time. So screen with the cheap check, and only spend the agent on messages that pass. Say who counts when you describe the job:Only handle mail from our billing address and anything with a PDF attached. Skip everything else without looking at it.
Here are the five vendors we buy from. Keep a list of them, check the sender against that list, and ignore the rest.Ask the agent to keep the list somewhere you can edit:
Put the sender list on a page in the UI so I can add addresses without asking you.Now a busy inbox costs you almost nothing. Two hundred newsletters get dropped by a sender check, and the agent only wakes up for the four invoices that matter.
A sender list beats a description. “Mail from
[email protected]” is a rule
your automation can check in one step. “Important vendor mail” is a judgment
call, so the agent has to read every message to make it.Turn on two switches
Two things must be on before a single message arrives, and you own one of them.1
You turn on inbox access
Go to Integrations in the dashboard, connect your Google account, and
switch on Incoming email.Only you can do this. The agent cannot turn it on and will never ask you for
a password. Reading your mail is your call to make.
2
The agent subscribes your workspace
Ask for the automation and the agent handles this part. It tells the platform
to deliver your mail to this workspace.
Ask for it
Say what should happen when a message arrives.Watch my inbox. When an invoice comes in, pull out the amount and the due date and add it to a table I can look at.
Sort my support mail into urgent and everything else, and show me the urgent ones first.
When a customer emails about a refund, draft a reply for me to review.Pair each of these with the sender rule from above, so the agent knows both which mail to open and what to do with it.
What your automation sees
Each message arrives with the sender, the recipients, the subject, the body, the time it landed, and a list of any attachments. Two limits are worth knowing up front:- Attachments come through as names only, not files. The agent can go fetch the actual file when your job needs it, so mention it if you need the contents.
- Very long messages get cut off past roughly 256KB of text. Your automation can tell when that happened.
Worth knowing
- Only your inbox counts. Sent mail, drafts, and spam never arrive, so do not build anything that expects to see your own replies.
- Each message arrives once. The platform handles duplicates for you.
- Mail can land late. If your workspace was asleep, expect a 10 to 60 second delay while it wakes up.
- Watch out for reply loops. Two automations that email each other are easy to start and annoying to stop. The agent will check with you before it sends anything back to an address that came from the message itself.
If mail is not arriving
Check your switch first. Open Integrations and confirm Incoming email is still on. It is the most common cause, and it is the half the agent cannot see or fix. Then ask the agent to check that the workspace is still subscribed.Change it later
Ignore anything from noreply addresses.
Also handle mail sent to the sales alias.
Stop watching my inbox.