How triage works

Every email that hits your inbox goes through alfred_’s triage pipeline. The goal: you see the messages that actually need your brain, and the rest are handled, archived, or queued for later. This page walks through how that works.

The triage pipeline

When a new message arrives, alfred_ runs four steps in order:

Each step is described below.

Step 1 — Classify

alfred_ first decides what kind of message you’re looking at. The main classes are:

• Personal correspondence — a real human writing to you specifically
• Transactional — receipts, confirmations, password resets, calendar invites
• Newsletter / digest — bulk content you may or may not want to skim
• Notification — automated alerts from apps and services
• Promotional / cold outreach — marketing or unsolicited sales

This is the most important decision the pipeline makes — different classes go down very different paths.

Step 2 — Score

For everything that isn’t pure noise, alfred_ scores urgency and importance independently.

Urgency signals

• Time-sensitive language (“by EOD”, “need this today”, “can you confirm by 3pm”)
• Follow-up count (a third “just bumping this” goes higher than the first email)
• Calendar proximity (a meeting today is more urgent than one next week)
• Deadline keywords explicitly mentioned in the body

Importance signals

• Whether you reply to this person frequently (inferred from your history)
• Subject keywords tied to revenue, hiring, or known projects
• Whether you’re on the To: line vs. CC’d vs. BCC’d
• Conversation history with the sender

These two scores combine into a single triage band: needs reply now, reply today, reply this week, FYI, or archive.

Step 3 — Act

Based on the band, alfred_ takes one of these actions automatically:

• Archive — newsletters, notifications, cold outreach, and noise. They never hit your visible inbox.
• Draft a reply — for anything that needs a response, alfred_ writes a draft based on the thread context and your communication style. Drafts wait for your approval — alfred_ never sends without you tapping send.
• Extract a task — if the email contains a commitment or an ask (“can you send me the deck”, “I’ll get back to you Tuesday”), alfred_ creates a task in your task list with the deadline.
• Escalate to Daily Brief — anything that needs your judgment lands in tomorrow’s Brief, sorted by urgency.

Step 4 — Surface

The Daily Brief you see each morning is the output of triage across your entire inbox over the past 24 hours. Sections roughly map to:

• Overdue promises — things you said you’d do but haven’t
• Relationship risk — important people you’ve gone quiet on
• Waiting on them — threads where the ball is in someone else’s court
• You owe replies — drafts ready for your approval
• Already handled — what alfred_ took care of without bothering you (audit log)

For more on the Brief structure, see Your Daily Brief.

Overriding the model

alfred_ infers who matters to you from your communication patterns — frequency, response time, and where you put people on the To/CC line. You don’t maintain a list.

If you want to override the model on a specific sender or domain, just say so in chat:

• “Always surface emails from john@acme.com”
• “Archive everything from notifications.atlassian.com”
• “Anything from @ourlawfirm.com is priority”

These become persistent rules that apply on every future triage run. If alfred_ ever archives something you wanted to see, just say “I needed to see that one” and the next run weights that signal accordingly.

What alfred_ never does

• Send email without your approval
• Mark unread email as read on your behalf (you decide when you’ve “seen” it)
• Permanently delete anything (everything archived is recoverable in Gmail/Outlook)
• Share or use your email content outside of running your assistant