Email Processing

Learn how to use emails as triggers, and capture information from them or perform actions on them.

To get started with email processing, you will need to enable the Apple Mail extension. Apple Mail is required for Inbox AI to be able to process email, but it can be running in the background while you using another email application if you prefer.

In Mail, go to "Settings", and then "Extensions", and check the Inbox AI extension.

Restart Apple mail after enabling the extension, else email processing will not work.

Enable the Inbox AI extension to enable email processing

After enabling, all incoming new email will be processed by Inbox AI. All processing happens on device, but email will be sent to your selected AI provider. You can disable processing, by unchecking the extension or by selecting "Do Nothing" as the email processor in the general settings.

Apple Mail Extension settings

Finally, you can customize the maximum age of incoming emails to process. To test the email processing, send yourself an email and wait for it to process. By default the "Process email" action is used to process incoming email. Let's check it out.

The process email action

The process email is an Ask AI action. The prompt is sent to the default AI provider you have chosen. The AI is given the ability to choose which action to call next, only these actions are available to the AI. In this example it has two options:

In the prompt, you can specify the behavior you are looking for. The {{ value }} placeholders in the prompt will be replaced by variables before sending them to the AI. In this case the {{ originalInput | process }} is the simplified incoming email, and your name is also inserted. For more information on templating, see the Templating page.

When the AI picks an email category, it calls the category action. Open it in the sidebar to check it out.

This is a Multiple Choice action, it routes an incoming value another AI chose, to another action. Here you can see that "Junk" is linked to "Move to Junk". And, more interestingly, "Task" is linked to another Ask AI action, that aims to extract tasks and add them to Apple Reminders.

You can change the behavior here, or build your own actions to fully control the behavior of the AI.

Selecting which emails are sent to AI

If for any reason you want to ensure only specific emails go into an AI action, you can use the power of the Templating in Inbox AI. Below is an example for a prompt that achieves this.

{% if originalInput | match: "To:.*hello@example\.com" %}
Categorize this email I ({{ settings.name }}) received below.

Email:
{{ originalInput | process }}
{% endif %}

The conditional if statement only returns a prompt when the originalInput has a line that matches the "To:" email header. Note that the match is a regular expression. It goes beyond this guide to explain these, but ChatGPT can help. Check the Logging to see what is sent to the AI.

Empty prompts will not trigger an actual request to the AI and are assumed to be a signal that the AI should do nothing.

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