Build an AI Inbox Agent with Claude (No Code)

What you’ll build

An AI agent that triages your Gmail every morning on a schedule. It reads every new email, sorts and labels them by category, archives the noise, and drafts replies to the ones that actually need you — then it just keeps running in the cloud, hands-off. No code, no Zapier, no API keys. Just Claude and your inbox.

What you’ll need

• A Claude account with Scheduled tasks (Claude Co-work)
• A Gmail account you’re willing to connect
• ~10 minutes for the first setup

Step 1: Open the Inbox triage scheduled task

In Claude, go to Scheduled tasks. You’ll see a set of ready-made tasks — meeting prep, content ideas, monitor a topic, and the one we want: Inbox triage. These come pre-built, so you don’t write anything from scratch. Click into Inbox triage.

Step 2: Set the schedule

Configure when it runs:

Frequency:      Daily
Time:           8:00 AM
Default model:  Opus

Approve and Save. That’s the whole setup — it now fires every morning on its own.

Step 3: Connect your Gmail

The task needs access to your inbox. Authorize Gmail when Claude asks (secure OAuth — it’s connected once). If your Claude account is already signed up under the same email, it may pick up your inbox automatically.

The agent only ever reads, labels, and drafts. It never deletes an email and never sends one without you.

Step 4: (Optional) Send yourself test emails

Before trusting it on your real inbox, send in a couple of examples from another address — a fake client email (“Hey, really liked our last call, before I sign off on the package…”) and a receipt. This lets you watch how it categorizes different types of mail on the first run.

Step 5: Run it and read the brief

Run the task. It collects the emails that came in, then hands back a summary — what it found, what’s important, and what’s just noise. On the test run it caught the client email (“Quick question before we move forward”), correctly flagged it as a likely test send, and swept up the promotional noise.

Step 6: Tell it how to sort

Give it your labeling rules in plain English. This is the exact prompt that worked:

Filter them out — label them. Make sure all the noise goes in one folder
and all the important stuff goes in other folders. Break it down into
whatever categories you think are appropriate.

It’ll come back with categories like Clients, Finance, Newsletters, Promotions, and Personal.

Step 7: When labeling fails, import Gmail filters

On the first pass, Claude may not have permission to create labels directly in Gmail (mailbox-modify is locked down). That’s normal — it won’t get it perfect first try. The fallback is a one-time manual import:

1. Have Claude generate a Gmail filter file (XML) for your categories, and download it
2. Gmail → gear icon (top right) → See all settings
3. Filters and Blocked Addresses tab
4. Import filters → Choose file → select the file Claude gave you
5. Create filters — check “Apply new filters to existing email”

Step 8: Verify the result

Reload your inbox. Everything gets filtered into folders — business, finance, health, newsletters, security, promotions — and the noise gets archived (on a personal inbox this cleared ~500 emails in one pass). New emails that need a response now have drafts already written and saved, ready for you to skim, tweak, and hit send.

Step 9: Leave it running

Back in Scheduled tasks the task shows Active, next run tomorrow at 8:00 AM. From here it’s fully hands-off — it triages your inbox every morning in the cloud, laptop closed. You can also hit it manually anytime by clicking Inbox triage → Run.

That’s it. Ten minutes of setup and the dragging-emails-into-folders era is over. Once it’s working, try the other scheduled tasks in there too — same pattern, different job.

Resources

• Agent Skills Marketplace — skillsmp.com (download prebuilt Claude skills, drag them onto your Claude Code setup)
• Wispr Flow — the voice-to-text I use to talk to Claude, 1 month free: https://wisprflow.ai/r?AUSTIN16480