If you run a digital agency, you already know the pattern: by 10am the inbox holds a copy revision, a frantic note about a broken contact form, three design briefs with conflicting deadlines, and a new lead asking about retainer pricing. Sorting it eats the morning. Even then, urgent items sit cold and owners get the wrong work.
This post shows you exactly how to build a Claude skill that triages incoming client emails for a digital agency, classifying them by service line, assigning urgency, suggesting an owner, and drafting a holding reply, all in an afternoon.
What you’ll need
- A Claude account with skills enabled (Cowork or Claude Code)
- A Gmail or Outlook MCP connector hooked up
- Optionally: Productive, Asana, or Slack connectors for downstream routing
- Fifteen minutes to map your existing workflow on paper
The five-step workflow to set up inbox triage
These four steps cover the complete process to establish your new inbox triage system – so you can stop worrying about what you’ve missed or got to later than was needed.
Step 1 – map your existing workflow
Before writing any skill, write down how your team already routes work. Most agencies split the inbox into a few clear streams:
- Copy work (new pieces, edits, tone-of-voice questions)
- Web content (CMS updates, page builds, content migrations)
- Website maintenance (bugs, plugin updates, performance complaints, security patches)
- Design (new assets, brand application, social graphics)
- New business and admin (proposals, invoices, contracts)
Within each stream, decide what counts as urgent. A “homepage showing a 500” email needs handling in ten minutes; a “tweak the meta description next sprint” email needs handling in ten days. Get the taxonomy on paper before you open Claude.
Step 2 – create the skill folder and SKILL.md
A skill is a folder Claude loads when it sees a matching task. Create a folder called email-triage and add a SKILL.md file inside it. The top of the file is a YAML block with a name and description. The description is what tells Claude when to use the skill, so make it specific:
---
name: email-triage
description: Use when sorting incoming client emails for a digital agency. Classifies each message by service line (copy, web content, site maintenance, design, new business), assigns urgency, suggests an owner, and drafts a holding reply.
---
Below that, write the instructions in plain English. Cover four things:
- The categories you defined in Step 1
- The urgency tiers and what defines each one
- Who owns each service line
- The output format (a structured JSON ticket plus a short holding reply works well)
Spell out edge cases the way you’d brief a new account manager. When an email touches two service lines, tell Claude to pick the dominant one and flag the secondary in notes. When the sender is a prospect rather than a client, route to new business and use a warmer tone. A thank-you email gets marked no-action.
Step 3 – add worked examples
Skills perform much better when SKILL.md links to a couple of worked examples. Create an examples/ subfolder and drop in two or three real emails (anonymised) alongside the triage decisions you’d have made.
For each example, show three things side by side:
- The inbound email
- Your reasoning for the classification
- The structured output Claude should produce
Three examples cover most of the variation you’ll see in a normal week. Reference them from SKILL.md so Claude pulls the right one when classifying ambiguous cases.
Step 4 – connect your inbox and run it
The skill itself doesn’t read your email; you need a connector for that. In Cowork, hook up the Gmail or Outlook MCP, then ask Claude:
Triage my unread emails using the email-triage skill.
For continuous coverage, schedule it. Run every 30 minutes, summarise the queue, and post a digest to a Slack channel so the right person can pick up urgent items without watching their inbox.
If you use Productive (or Asana, or Linear) for project tracking, take it one step further. Have the skill create a task on the relevant board with the right tags, assignee, and due date, then leave a one-line note in the email thread saying you’ve logged it.
Step 5 – tune it weekly
Skills are not set-and-forget. Block fifteen minutes every Friday and review what Claude got wrong:
- A redesign request misfiled as maintenance
- A scope question routed to design instead of new business
- A P1 marked as P3
Edit SKILL.md to cover the case. The file is just markdown, so version it in git and keep a short changelog at the bottom. Within a month, the skill handles the boring 80% of incoming work and surfaces the 20% that needs human judgment to the top of the queue.
Download the Claude skill for inbox triage
We’ve packaged this exact workflow as a Claude Skill: a reusable instruction set you can install directly into Claude. Once installed, just say “triage my inbox” and Claude handles the rest automatically.
Download the Claude skill
At Oriel, we connect business tools and cut the manual work that slows teams down. If you would like to explore what this could look like for your team, get in touch.