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Let the first week run on suggestions only

Onboarding already does this for you: every action it creates is suggest-only, so nothing fires without your click. Resist the urge to graduate rules on day one. That first week is what lets you see how InboxMate reads your real mail before you hand it any autonomy. Do:
  • Watch a full week of traffic before graduating anything — most inboxes have weekly patterns (Monday backlog, Friday newsletters) that a single day won’t show you
  • Graduate one rule at a time from KI-Reife, starting with the boring ones (a newsletter sender you always archive)
Don’t:
  • Graduate a rule “to save time” after two or three approvals — a wrongly auto-archived customer email costs more time than the clicks you saved
  • Turn on auto-reply (Business plans) before you’ve reviewed dozens of drafts manually

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Treat Entscheidungen as the real workflow, not a chore

Every suggestion — a category assignment, an archive, a draft reply — lands in Entscheidungen until a person acts on it. Click Ja to approve, Anders when it’s close but needs a tweak, Ignorieren to dismiss it outright.
Anders is more valuable than Ja. Approving with no changes tells InboxMate it got something right; editing tells it exactly what “right” looks like for your business. In the first weeks, favor a quick edit over a rubber-stamp approval.

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Let it learn from your edits — then check in on KI-Reife

Approvals and edits aren’t just clearing your queue, they’re training data. Once you’ve approved the same kind of action several times, InboxMate offers to graduate it: a prompt titled “Ab jetzt automatisch?” asks whether that specific action should run on its own from now on.
  • Click Ja, automatisch for rules you’ve reviewed enough times to trust blindly (e.g., “always archive this newsletter sender”)
  • Click Weiter fragen if you want a few more reps before handing it over
  • Check KI-Reife (AI maturity) periodically to see which categories have earned enough trust to graduate, and which are still shaky
Graduate rule by rule, not all at once. A category that’s 100% reliable (“Spam”) and one that’s borderline (“Kundenanfrage”) don’t belong on the same autopilot switch.

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Keep customer-facing replies human until you’re confident

Draft-and-suggest is safe by default — InboxMate writes the reply, you decide whether it goes out. Auto-send (Business plans, via Mit KI antworten in auto mode) skips that review, so treat it as the last thing you turn on, not the first:
  • Prove the draft quality first. Read a few weeks of drafts for a category before considering auto-send for it
  • Start auto-send on your lowest-stakes category (an FAQ-style category with a stable answer), not your highest-value customer segment
  • Even after graduating, spot-check sent replies occasionally — auto doesn’t mean unmonitored

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Connect Outlook, not just forwarding

Forwarding gets emails into InboxMate, but it’s a one-way copy — InboxMate can’t act on the original mailbox. Connecting Outlook / Microsoft 365 via OAuth unlocks the parts that make automation actually useful:
  • Archiving in InboxMate moves the message in your real Outlook Archive folder, so the mailbox stays in sync with what your team sees
  • Replies send from your real address and land in your Sent folder
  • AI drafts mirror into your Outlook Drafts folder, so anyone can review and send from Outlook itself, mobile included
If you’re stuck on forwarding for now (unsupported provider, no admin buy-in yet), it still works for triage and drafting — you just lose the two-way sync. See Email integration for the full comparison and the Microsoft 365 admin-consent steps if your tenant blocks self-serve OAuth.

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Keep categories tight and re-check them

A handful of categories that map to real actions (draft a reply, open a ticket, archive) work better than a long taxonomy nobody looks at. Start from the AI-proposed categories or a template, then prune.
New product line, new support process, seasonal spike — revisit your categories in the flow editor rather than letting a stale rule silently mis-sort mail.
If an email lands somewhere unexpected, open it and click the category badge → Im Flow ansehen to replay exactly which rule matched and why.

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Monitor and improve

  • Check KI-Reife (AI maturity) to see which rules are ready to graduate and which need more supervision
  • Watch Usage & Billing if you’ve turned on several drafting categories — AI drafts and auto-replies consume credits, rule-based sorting and routing don’t
  • Revisit categories after any real change to your business — a stale category is worse than no category