The AI analyses your inbox
There is no mode to pick. The step starts scanning the moment it opens: it waits for the mailbox’s first sync to finish, samples up to 100 of your most recent inbound emails, summarises them, and asks the model to propose a small set of categories that fit your real traffic. It’s read-only — nothing is saved until you confirm. When the scan finishes you land on the preview screen with:- Proposed categories — each with a name, a one-line description, and a cluster of Beispielsender (example senders the AI saw for that category) so you can sanity-check the proposal at a glance.
- An editable card per category — rename it, rewrite the description, or remove it. Kategorie hinzufügen adds one of your own.
If the mailbox is brand-new and empty, the AI has nothing to read. You’ll see an “empty inbox” notice with a E-Mails erneut laden & analysieren button that re-syncs recent mail and tries again — useful right after connecting Outlook, where the first sync can lag a few seconds.If the analysis takes too long, InboxMate falls back to a proven starter set (Wichtig · Newsletter · Spam) and says so in a banner. The set is editable exactly like an AI proposal, so you’re never blocked. If the request fails outright you get Analyse hat nicht geklappt instead, with Erneut versuchen and Mit Standard-Kategorien starten.
Autonomy is earned, not chosen here
Below the category cards is an explanation panel, not a setting:Full autonomy is earned, not preset. To start, InboxMate only suggests actions — you approve them. The AI learns from your approvals and corrections; once a rule has matured you can switch it to autopilot in the KI-Reife tab.Every action created by this step is suggest-only, without exception — including archiving and spam. That’s why every action chip on the category cards reads vorschlagen: there is no green “auto” chip to earn at this stage. Rules graduate to autopilot one at a time, later, from KI-Reife — never as a preset on this screen.
Don’t confuse this with the confidence preset (Vorsichtig / Standard / Aggressiv) in the flow editor. That controls how certain the AI must be before it assigns a category at all — a separate concept from whether an action runs on its own. Onboarding always saves the categorizer on Standard.
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Hit Übernehmen und weiter. InboxMate saves one categorizer scoped to the mailbox you just connected. The first triage then runs as its own onboarding step, In Aktion sehen: InboxMate pulls your newest mail, categorizes the most recent conversations from the last 14 days (up to 15 of them), reports how many emails it triaged, and hands you into the Entscheidungen queue. If the mailbox is quiet, you’ll see Noch keine neuen E-Mails instead — the categorizer is live either way and sorts whatever arrives next. From here you can fine-tune everything — add conditions, change actions, test a sample email — in the flow editor.The onboarding step always sets up an email categorizer scoped to one mailbox. To cover several mailboxes, or to categorize widget chats too, adjust the scope later in the editor — see Categorizers.Prefer to start from a hand-built template instead of an AI proposal? Templates are no longer part of onboarding — they live in Einstellungen → Categorizers, where you can add one at any time.