The problem
An agency director receives 80+ emails a day. Real client requests drown between newsletters and notifications, urgent messages get answered late, and the first two hours of every day disappear into the inbox.
The solution, step by step
- In n8n, schedule a workflow every morning at 7:45 that fetches the last 24 hours of Gmail messages.
- Filter out newsletters and automatic notifications with simple rules (sender domains, unsubscribe headers).
- Send the remaining messages to ChatGPT with a strict prompt: classify each email as "answer today", "can wait" or "ignore", with a one-line summary each.
- For the "answer today" group, ask the model to also propose a one-sentence draft reply as a starting point.
- Format the digest and deliver it at 8:00 on Telegram (or WhatsApp) — readable in two minutes with coffee.
- Keep the original emails untouched: the digest links back, the human decides and sends.
- Inbox triage drops from 90 minutes to about 10 minutes per day.
- Urgent client emails answered the same morning, every time.
- Roughly 25 hours per month recovered for actual high-value work.