RedHorse AI Triage Training
Set up AI Email Triage
Eight stages, in the order you’ll actually do them. Work through 1–5 to get triage running on your own mail; the advanced stages are there when you’re ready to tune it.
What is AI Triage?
Incoming mail lands in one intake folder. AI reads each message, matches it to a bucket you’ve described in plain English, and files it into that bucket’s destination folder. You decide whether it does that on its own or shows you its work first.
A bucket is two things
A destination folder, and a plain-English description of what belongs in it. The description is what the AI actually matches against, so write it the way you’d explain it to a new assistant.
AI suggests, you decide
In Preview mode nothing moves until you check the rows you agree with and click Apply Selected. Apply Now skips the preview and files everything immediately.
The contact signal
Every row in the preview grid tells you whether the sender is in your CRM. It’s the fastest way to spot mail that matters:
Before you begin
All of this happens outside AI Triage, in the Email Center’s account and rule settings, before you ever open AI Triage Configuration. Four steps: pick the account, make the folder, retrieve mail automatically, and route it into the folder.
2.1Choose the account
If you have more than one email account in RedHorse, decide which one you’re setting triage up for. Everything that follows is scoped to that account. Nothing to do here, just a decision to make.
2.2Create the intake subfolder
Right-click Inbox in the folder tree and choose Add Subfolder. This is the folder triage will read from.
Start the folder name with an asterisk — like *Intake — so it sorts to the top of your folder list instead of getting buried alphabetically.
2.3Turn on Auto Retrieve
Open Email Settings and on the Accounts tab, select the account and click Edit. Tick Include this account in Auto-Retrieve for the account so RedHorse pulls mail in on its own.
Auto Retrieve is not required for triage, it just makes it easy. You can go to the account and drag, or use File To, to put mail in the intake folder yourself if you prefer.
2.4Route that account’s mail into the folder
A rule is what actually puts retrieved mail into the intake folder. Scope it to the account and set the action to Move to Sub-Inbox Folder, pointed at the folder you just made.
Rules and triage are not rivals
Rules do the precise routing — this account, this sender, always this folder. Triage handles the fuzzy sorting afterwards, deciding what a message is actually about. Setting up this rule is the first example of the two working together.
Setup: account, folder, buckets
Everything in this stage lives in one place. The examples use Driftwood Design Co., a small interior design firm, and the same handful of senders recur through the rest of the page.
3.1Turn it on
3.2Point it at an intake folder
Triage only reads the folders listed here and checked Active. One intake folder on one account is the normal starting point.
With a second mailbox in play, each account gets its own intake folder row. Only the checked rows are read on a run, so you can bring the second account online when you’re ready rather than all at once.
Setting up another account? Either add a new intake subfolder and run Propose again from scratch, or point it at the same intake folder and reuse the buckets you already built.
3.3Your bucket list
On a fresh install the grid is empty and offers to do the first pass for you.
You haven’t set up any buckets yet. AI can scan a folder and propose a starting set based on the mail that’s actually in there.
Propose Buckets…Once it’s filled in, this is the screen you’ll come back to. This is what a sample bucket list might look like for a new user. Every bucket here files into a subfolder of the Inbox, so nothing leaves your sight while you’re learning what the AI does with your mail.
The same buckets, pointed at their long-term homes: only the mail you act on stays in the Inbox, and junk goes straight to Deleted Items.
Got one sender you always want handled the same way — like every email from one specific newsletter? Skip triage for that one and set up an email rule straight into a subfolder instead. Save AI triage for the fuzzy calls it’s actually good at.
3.4Create your buckets
To get started with your own buckets, the Propose feature is the fastest way to get going. It lets you select a folder and then suggests a starting set based on the mail that’s actually in there.
When you know exactly what you want, skip Propose and write the bucket yourself. This is also the dialog you land in when you edit an existing bucket.
3.5Decide where unsure mail goes
Some mail won’t clearly match any bucket. Tell triage what to do with it now, before a run happens with nobody watching.
Leaving it in the intake folder is the cautious choice, but the folder fills up. Pointing it at a folder of its own keeps intake clean and still puts the leftovers somewhere you’ll look.
Add a catch-all bucket — something like “Needs Attention” or “Unclassified” — for anything that doesn’t cleanly match. It gives AI somewhere safe to put an uncertain guess instead of leaving it in the flat inbox.
Run & review
With buckets in place, a run takes a few seconds. In Preview mode nothing moves until you say so, which is how you should work for the first few weeks.
4.1Start a run
4.2Review the preview
One row per email, with the bucket AI picked and how sure it is. Uncheck anything you disagree with, or change it in the Override column, then apply.
You don’t have to decide on all 28 at once. Apply the obvious ones, and the grid refreshes with only what’s left — usually the handful that actually need thought. If you close RedHorse mid-review, the preview is waiting when you come back.
Discard throws away the suggestions, not the emails — they stay in the intake folder for the next run.
4.3What the Email Center looks like afterwards
The intake folder is empty and everything has landed where it belongs. Bold folders are the ones holding new mail, so a morning pass is three or four small reviews instead of one long scroll.
Bold subfolders mean there’s mail waiting. It’s a lot easier to review buckets one at a time than to scroll one long inbox.
Point your most important bucket — the one for CRM-linked, must-see mail — at the Inbox itself. Give everything else its own subfolder, so Inbox stays reserved for what actually matters.
Go automatic
When the preview stops surprising you, hand the run over. Triage then happens every time mail is retrieved, with no preview step.
5.1Turn on Run after auto-retrieve
5.2Are you ready?
While you’re still building trust in a bucket, keep pointing it at an Inbox subfolder — review is one click away. Once you’re comfortable, switch its destination to a Filed (or Deleted) folder so that mail gets out of your way automatically.
Once you’re comfortable with how a bucket’s behaving, turn on Run after auto-retrieve and let it work in the background.
Keep it sharp
Every override you make is remembered. These three tools turn that record into better buckets: teach AI a one-off, review the corrections it’s collected, and promote a repeating pattern into the bucket’s own description. For reshaping the bucket set itself, see stage 07.
6.1Teach AI a single email
The quickest correction of all. Right-click any email in the Email Center, choose Teach AI, and pick the bucket it should have gone to. The choice is recorded as a correction — you don’t have to touch the bucket’s description.
Teach AI: this email belongs to…
6.2Review the corrections
Every override from the preview grid and every Teach AI lands here. Three row colours tell you what’s happening: green means the correction is already feeding the AI’s prompt, yellow means two corrections disagree, and blue means there are enough like it to justify a new bucket.
6.3Promote a pattern into the description
When enough corrections point the same way, the bucket turns light blue in the grid: it’s ready to promote. Select it, click Promote, and AI drafts a sentence that folds the pattern into the bucket’s own description — so it stops being a list of exceptions and becomes part of the rule.
The Bucket Shop
Buckets aren’t something you get right once. This is the workbench: build a new one from mail you already have, audit the whole set when classification starts to wobble, and merge the ones that turned out to be the same bucket wearing two names.
7.1Build a bucket from mail you already have
Often the easiest way to make a bucket is to point at examples. Select two or more emails in the Email Center — or in the triage preview grid — right-click, and choose Build Bucket from Selection. AI reads them and pre-fills the name and description.
7.2Audit the whole bucket set
Audit looks at your buckets as a group rather than one at a time. Click Scan and it reports what’s overlapping, too broad, or in the wrong place.
7.3Merge buckets that overlap
Pick the bucket that survives, tick the ones folding into it, and AI combines the descriptions. It warns you when the buckets it’s merging don’t actually behave the same way.
Check the bucket(s) to merge into “Newsletters”, then Suggest via AI or Apply directly.
Don’t treat setup as one-and-done — periodically run Audit on your bucket set, and use Merge or Promote when you notice buckets overlapping or the same correction pattern repeating.
History & undo
Every run is logged with what it scanned, classified, and moved. If a run went wrong, you can reverse it in one step.
8.1The run log
8.2Undo a run
Select a run and click Undo Run. Every email that run moved goes back to the folder it came from.
Cancelling part-way leaves the run half-reversed: the emails already moved back stay where they are. Run the undo again to finish it.