AI for a shared team inbox
The two classic shared-inbox failures — answered twice, or never — both come from nobody owning the email. Your assistant makes sure everything gets an owner within the hour.
What you'll end up with
- Every incoming email turned into an owned card on your board — nothing lives (or dies) in the inbox.
- Mail sorted to the right person or team by topic, sender, or your own rules in plain language.
- A daily digest of what came in, what's unowned, and what's gone quiet.
Before you start
- Sortd set up in Gmail — a board for the inbox (say Inbox Ops) with lists like To sort, Doing, Waiting, Done.
- Your assistant connected — two minutes, one browser approval: Connect your AI. Everything below works in Claude, ChatGPT, or any connected assistant.
- The right permissions — when you connect you tick what the assistant may do — send permissions start unticked. For this guide: reading email, reading and updating the board.
Set it up by talking to your assistant
Each step is something you type (or say) to your assistant — copy them as they are, or change the names to match your own boards and lists. You don't need to know what happens behind the scenes, but we explain it anyway.
1. Show it the lay of the land
Names first, so its sorting matches your structure.
Look at the Inbox Ops board and tell me what lists it has and who the members are.What happens: It reads the board and the member list — the people it can assign work to.
2. Sort the backlog once
Start clean: the pile that's been accumulating becomes a board you can actually look at.
Go through unsorted mail in this inbox from the last two weeks. Make each real request a card on Inbox Ops / To sort, tag by topic, and skip newsletters and notifications.What happens: Real requests become cards; noise is left behind. Sortd's filters already exclude spam and auto-replies.
3. Teach it your routing in one sentence
Your routing rules probably fit in a sentence each — that's all it needs.
From now on when I ask you to sort: invoices and anything about payment goes to Ana, press and partnership emails to Marco, everything technical to the dev rotation — assign those to whoever has fewest open cards.What happens: The assistant applies this in future runs. (It balances load by counting open cards per member — a small thing no filter rule can do.)
4. The daily sweep
The habit that keeps a shared inbox trustworthy.
Sort today's new mail, then give me a short digest: what came in, what's still unowned in To sort, and any card in Waiting with no reply for 3+ days.What happens: Sorting plus a human-readable summary — the digest lands in the chat, the work lands on the board.
Put it on autopilot
Once a run works when you ask for it, schedule it — run the sweep every morning before the team sits down.
Every weekday at 8am, sort new mail in this inbox onto Inbox Ops using my routing rules, then post a digest: new arrivals, unowned cards, and anything in Waiting gone quiet for 3 days.Claude (Cowork scheduled tasks) and ChatGPT (scheduled tasks) can both do this — cadences, tips and more recipes are on AI Schedule.
You stay in control
- Drafts by default. Unless you granted a send permission, the assistant can only prepare replies — they wait in Gmail for a human to send.
- Everything is visible. Every card the assistant creates or moves shows up on the board instantly, exactly as if a teammate did it — same statuses, same history, same audit trail.
- Easy to undo, easy to unplug. Moves and statuses can be changed back on the board, and you can disconnect the assistant at any time from the same place you connected it.
More: AI for email delegation · every action the assistant can take, with example prompts: AI Reference · all use cases: AI guides