Email Triage for Small UK Firms: A Classify, Draft and Approve Pattern

Description and use

Small UK firms use a single shared inbox where enquiries, invoices, complaints, spam and job applications mix. An automated pattern classifies emails, routes them to the right team member, drafts replies, and requires human approval before sending, reducing manual triage and improving oversight.

Problem

Small UK firms use a single shared inbox for diverse emails, causing owners to manually sort them each night.

Outcome

The pattern reduces manual triage, ensures human approval before sending, and provides data to refine snippets and classification.

Workflow

• Classify email subject and body into one of seven categories using an LLM with a confidence threshold; uncertain cases default to "other".
• Route the email based on its category: assign to a team member, set a label, decide whether to draft a reply, and trigger alerts for complaints.
• Generate a draft reply for categories that allow drafting (e.g., new enquiries) using approved snippets; the draft is inserted into the thread but not sent.
• A human reviews the draft, edits if necessary, and sends the email; the decision is logged with message ID, category, confidence, approver, and edit status.
• Log every decision to identify heavily edited drafts and improve snippets.
• Test the classifier with anonymised real emails, including forwarded chains, replies without subjects, and attachment‑only messages, before trusting the system.

Evidence

Many small UK firms still run on one shared inbox: info@ or hello@. New enquiries, supplier invoices, complaints, spam and job applications all mix together, and the owner sorts them at night.

Source

The pattern is provider-neutral.

Source

We build this kind of triage after a 72‑hour audit of the inbox workflow.

Source