01
An inbox already triaged
What needs you today, this week, or not at all — sorted by what happens if you ignore it, not by when it arrived.
Your agent, on Email
AI agents for email
An inbox that works while you are in it.
Email is where work goes to wait. Your agent gets its own mailbox: it triages what arrives, answers the routine threads in your voice, drafts the ones that need you, chases the replies nobody chased, and sends one digest instead of four hundred unread.
TL;DR
What you get
- Routine threads answered end to end, in your voice, with you copied.
- The hard replies waiting as drafts with the quote and history assembled.
- Quiet threads chased once, in the original thread, without you remembering.
- One morning digest: handled, waiting, needs a decision from you.
- The agent owns its own address — no IMAP password, no access to your mailbox.
What it handles
Six outcomes, before you open the laptop.
02
Routine threads closed without you
Pricing, availability, where to send the invoice, the attachment they lost — answered in your voice from your own information.
03
Hard replies waiting as drafts
Quote, thread history and what you said last time are assembled, so you edit instead of composing.
04
No follow-up forgotten
The thread that went quiet eleven days ago gets one polite nudge, and the reply lands back in the same thread.
05
Meetings booked in one exchange
“Any time Tuesday?” becomes a proposed time, an invite and a reply, instead of six messages narrowing it down.
06
No invented commitments
Anything committing money, dates or promises you did not authorise stops as a draft rather than being sent.
A real thread
It replies like a colleague, not an autoresponder.
The sender gets a real answer to the actual question, in your voice, with you on the thread. Nothing announces that a machine handled it, because nothing about the answer needs an excuse.
Email · hello@studio-north.comAn email agent vs inbox rules and templates
Filters move mail. They do not answer it.
Rules, labels and canned responses sort your inbox into piles you still have to work through. The unread count goes down; the amount of writing you owe people does not.
| Capability | Your Email agent | Filters, labels and templates |
|---|---|---|
| What it does with a message | Answers it, or drafts the answer. | Puts it in a folder. |
| Routine questions | Handled end to end, in your voice. | A template you still have to pick and edit. |
| Follow-ups | Chased on its own, once, in the same thread. | A reminder you snooze. |
| Attachments | Read, with the missing piece named. | Downloaded, by you. |
| Scheduling | Proposes, invites, confirms. | Six emails and a calendar link. |
| Your morning | One digest of what matters. | Four hundred unread, neatly labelled. |
Start from a complete template
Orchid
The assistant that never sleeps: email intelligence, calendar, reminders, a daily digest, and a browser handoff when the answer is behind a login.
What comes with it
- Inbox triage by consequence, not arrival time
- Routine threads answered in your voice from your own information
- Drafts assembled with quote, history and context for the hard replies
- Follow-ups chased once, in the original thread
- Meetings proposed, invited and confirmed
- One morning digest: handled, waiting, and needing you
Evidence
What the inbox actually costs you.
Published research on email load and AI-assisted writing. None of these studies tested Keiki — they measure the behaviour an email agent is built on.
Time in the inbox tracks stress and fragmented attention.
A study of information workers logging email activity found that longer time spent in email was associated with higher stress and more self-interruption.
Email Duration, Batching and Self-interruptionMark et al., CHI 2016
Drafting with AI is faster and rated better.
In a preregistered experiment with 453 professionals, ChatGPT cut the time spent on mid-level writing tasks and raised output quality as judged by blinded evaluators.
Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligenceNoy & Zhang, Science, 2023
Replying quickly is what keeps an enquiry alive.
A study of how firms handle online enquiries found most reply far too slowly to reach a prospect while the enquiry is still live.
The Short Life of Online Sales LeadsHarvard Business Review, 2011
Further reading
Worth reading on email for agents.
- AgentMail documentation
The inbox infrastructure behind an agent that owns its own address.
AgentMail
- Email sender guidelines
Why SPF, DKIM and DMARC decide whether your agent’s replies reach the inbox.
Google
- RFC 7489: Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC)
The standard your domain records are checked against before an agent can send as your brand.
RFC Editor
Questions
What people ask about running an agent on email.
- Does it use my mailbox or its own?
- Its own — the agent has a real mailbox it sends and receives from, and you stay copied. That means it can act on threads without borrowing your identity or sitting inside your personal inbox.
- Will it send things without asking me?
- It answers routine threads from information you gave it. Anything that commits money, dates or promises you did not authorise stops as a draft for you to approve.
- Does it sound like a bot?
- It writes from your own material in your register — no disclaimers, no "as an AI". If it cannot answer well, it drafts rather than sends.
- Can it read attachments?
- Yes. Invoices, forms and spreadsheets are read, the relevant figures extracted, and anything missing named in the reply instead of discovered a week later.
- What about follow-ups?
- Threads that go quiet get one polite nudge in the original thread. Replies land back where they belong, with the history intact.
- How long does setup take?
- Start from the Orchid template, connect the mailbox and your calendar, and paste in what you would tell a new assistant. The first digest arrives the next morning.
Get your mornings back.
Request access at onkeiki.com, open the Orchid template, give the agent its own address. About 10 minutes to routine threads answering themselves.