Inbox Agent: action workspace and triage

Email as an action workspace, not an endless scroll:

• Metric cards for unread, action-needed mail, suggested actions, and open commitments—so you choose what to focus on first.
• Views that separate Inbox, Sent, and All, so outbound mail does not clutter received triage.
• Sort by Recent or Priority depending on whether you need newest-first or highest-signal-first.
• Prep thread on a selected conversation: concise summary, draft reply, and extracted commitments—then send, discard, or iterate before anything external happens.

This is the productized version of “read less, act on what matters.” See the Inbox Agent documentation for surfaces and workflow.

• Local-first persistence: synced mail stays visible from the local database after restart, so triage is not a blank slate.
• AI-assisted buckets (Action Needed, Suggested Actions, Open Commitments) sit beside deterministic Unread—you always know what is provider-backed vs assisted.
• Safer review flow: generated drafts do not ship without human approval in the normal flow.
• Complements broader inbox and life ops patterns with a first-party UI for mail.

1. Open Inbox Agent and let it load cached mailbox state from the local database.
2. Read metric cards to decide: unread sweep vs action-needed vs commitments.
3. Use Inbox vs Sent vs All when you need isolation (for example outbound review).
4. Sort Priority when volume is high; Recent when time order matters.
5. On a thread, run Prep thread; then send, discard, or edit before send.

• A connected mailbox with sync enabled; behavior is still gated by provider capabilities for send, archive, trash, read state, and scheduling.
• Comfort with AI-assisted labels—spot-check until you trust the ranking.

1. Baseline a week: note where you disagree with Action Needed vs skippable mail.
2. Tune habits: same time daily for metric-card review, or batch twice a day.
3. For each high-stakes thread, Prep thread and verify facts against the raw message.
4. Archive or cleanup only after you are confident nothing important is hidden.
5. When a thread changes materially, use Refresh intel (see commitments use case) to re-sync analysis.

• “After Prep thread, list assumptions you made that I should verify.”
• “Propose three subject-line rewrites; pick the calmest tone.”
• “What missing context would change this draft?”

• You have dry-run behavior: drafts are reviewed, not auto-sent.
• Provider limits understood (rate limits, attachment size).
• Backup or export story for mail exists outside the agent alone.

• Trusting priority over your own knowledge of a key customer or boss.
• Batching so long that time-sensitive mail ages out.
• Confusing suggested actions with obligations—humans still decide.
• Fatigue from too many AI buckets—simplify until the UI is usable.