Free template · Internal Ops · Email

Open email three times a day. Not thirty.

Reads incoming email, classifies by type: customer support, sales lead, vendor pitch, internal, noise. Routes each to the right place. Owner only sees what actually needs them.

Setup time ~25 minutes
Run cost ~$2/mo (3,000 emails)
Validation Tested + ready to run
License Free, yours forever

What it does

One inbox tamed.

  1. 1
    Gmail Trigger — every minute
    Polls for unread Gmail. Set to 15-minute intervals if cost is a concern. Filters to unread only so you don't reprocess archived messages.
  2. 2
    Classify Email — OpenAI
    Sends sender, subject, and snippet to gpt-4o-mini with a system prompt that returns exactly one label: customer, sales, vendor, internal, or noise.
  3. 3
    Route by Type — Switch
    Five outputs, one per label. Each gets a different action.
  4. 4
    Customer → Slack #support
    Posts to your support channel so a human responds fast.
  5. 5
    Sales → CRM lead
    Creates a HubSpot contact with status NEW and the email body as a note. Same pattern for Pipedrive, Close, Salesforce.
  6. 6
    Vendor → Gmail label
    Adds a 'Vendor' label so the email skips your inbox but stays searchable.
  7. 7
    Internal → DM you in Slack
    Direct message so you see it without opening Gmail.
  8. 8
    Noise → Archive
    Adds a 'Noise' label and (in production) you can chain to a Gmail archive operation to pull it out of the inbox.

Use it in your business

Vertical-specific framing

Founder or solo operator
The 'noise' bucket alone reclaims 30-60 minutes a day. The 'sales' bucket means no lead sits unread for 12 hours.
Agency or consultancy
Customer emails route to the AM channel, sales emails create deals, vendor invoices get tagged for accounting, internal teammates DM you, marketing newsletters get archived.
E-commerce
Customer emails route to your support tool (Gorgias, Zendesk), supplier emails get tagged, marketing partner emails route to a separate channel.
Real estate or sales-heavy team
Inbound buyer/seller leads create deals in Follow Up Boss or your CRM in seconds. Vendor and admin email gets shunted out of the way.
Get the template
Three quick questions, then we send the JSON. We use the answers to recommend templates that fit your business.

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What you'll need

Three accounts. Two free.

n8n Free self-hosted, or n8n Cloud starting $20/mo
OpenAI API key Pay-as-you-go, ~$0.0007 per email classified
Gmail account OAuth2 in n8n; works for both personal and Workspace
Slack + CRM For the routing destinations

The math

What this is worth, conservatively

Average time spent triaging email per day 30-90 minutes (McKinsey: knowledge worker spends 28% of week on email)
Time recovered with classifier + routing ~50-70%
Annualized hours recovered (1 hr/day saved, 250 work days) ~250 hours
At $50/hr blended ~$12,500/year
Cost to run this template forever ~$24/year

Time savings based on McKinsey Global Institute knowledge worker email research. Per-person impact varies with role and inbox volume.

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SOP Generator from Recording
Record a how-to once. Get a written SOP. Stop answering the same internal email five times.

Want this tuned to your inbox?

If you'd rather have us train the classifier on your actual email patterns, set up the right CRM destinations, and tune the routing rules. that's our $4,000-6,500 inbox build. 1 to 2 weeks.

Book a 15-min walkthrough