Inbox triage is AIDA's always-on email monitoring: it checks your Gmail or Outlook inbox on a schedule you set, decides what qualifies as urgent using your own definition written in plain language, and alerts you on the channel you choose - with an optional ready-to-send draft reply attached. Everything else waits quietly for the next time you open your mail.
Most AI email tools summarize your inbox when you ask. Triage is different: it works while you don't, and its job is to interrupt you as rarely as possible.
The five controls
AIDA's triage panel has five settings, and together they define its entire behavior:
- Check every - how often AIDA polls your inbox, from every 5 minutes upward. Frequent checks for fast-moving work; hourly for calmer inboxes.
- Alert channel - where urgent alerts land: web chat, Telegram, WhatsApp, or Discord. Triage runs on the server, so alerts arrive even when no browser is open.
- Quiet hours - a start and end time (say, 9:00 PM to 7:00 AM) during which AIDA stays silent. Urgent mail is still detected; the interruption waits for morning.
- What counts as urgent to me - the core of the feature. This is a free-text field, not a checkbox list. You write what matters in your own words: "anything from my lawyer," "payment failures," "messages mentioning the Henderson project." AIDA reads each incoming email against that description.
- Always ignore - the opposite list: newsletters, specific senders, or keywords that should never trigger an alert no matter what.
Draft replies: the second half of the feature
With draft replies enabled, an urgent alert arrives with a ready-to-send response already written - grounded in the email's content and AIDA's persistent memory of your preferences and contacts. You read the alert, read the draft, and either send it, edit it, or ignore it. The judgment stays yours; the typing doesn't.
Why plain-language urgency beats filters
Traditional email rules match mechanical patterns: sender equals X, subject contains Y. They cannot express "urgent" as humans mean it - a concept that depends on context, relationships, and what is happening in your work this month.
Because AIDA's urgency definition is interpreted by a language model rather than a rule engine, it handles instructions no filter can:
- "Anything that sounds like a client is unhappy"
- "Invoices over $1,000, but only from new vendors"
- "Whatever relates to the Q3 launch"
And because it runs on your server under your own API key, the emails being evaluated are processed through infrastructure and a model provider that you chose - not a third-party inbox-scanning service holding a copy of your mail.
A realistic day with triage on
7:00 AM, quiet hours end: AIDA's morning briefing arrives on Telegram - weather, meetings, tasks, and the two emails flagged urgent overnight, each with a draft attached. During the day it checks every 5 minutes and stays silent through forty routine messages. At 2:14 PM a client's "this isn't working" lands; thirty seconds later your phone buzzes with the alert and a calm, complete draft response. At 9:00 PM, quiet hours begin and the interruptions stop.
That is the goal: not more notifications about email - dramatically fewer, and only the ones you defined.
Turning it on
Inbox triage ships with every AIDA install and is off by default. It is one toggle in the settings panel once your Gmail or Outlook account is connected via OAuth - the setup guide covers it, and the 7-day free trial includes the full feature.