Categorizers - InboxMate

Categorizers tell InboxMate how to handle each incoming message. Define a list of categories with descriptions, and the AI assigns every new email (or inactive widget chat) to exactly one. Each category can trigger actions like archiving, creating a ticket, sending a notification, replying with AI, or calling a webhook. You manage categorizers from Settings → Kategorisierer, or visually in the flow editor. InboxMate ships with one default email categorizer per workspace, pre-filled with seven common categories (e.g., Kundenanfrage, Intern, Spam, Newsletter, Zustellfehler).

New to categorizers? The fastest start is the onboarding Kategorisieren step right after connecting a mailbox — see Categorizing your inbox. To split one category into condition-based paths, see Conditions & branches.

How it works

A new email arrives, or a widget chat goes inactive (30 minutes without a new message)
InboxMate runs the matching categorizer through the LLM once per subject
The LLM picks one category, returns a confidence score, summary, and reasoning
Each action on the matched category runs in auto mode (executes) or suggest mode (waits for human review)

Actions

Each category can trigger one or more of these actions:

Action	What it does
Archivieren	Marks the email thread as archived
Kontakt anlegen	Finds or creates a contact for the sender (find-or-create by email) and links it to the conversation. Name and role are auto-filled by the AI. This is the only action that creates a contact — see Kontakt anlegen below.
Ticket erstellen	Opens a ticket with an AI-generated title, description, and priority by default; can auto-assign a teammate (AI-picked by default). See Ticket erstellen below.
Unternehmen recherchieren	Finds or creates the sender’s company in your CRM and scrapes its website into the company’s notes. Researches each company once by default and requires a contact to exist first — see Unternehmen recherchieren below.
Antwort entwerfen	Pre-generates an AI reply draft and stores it on the conversation. With an Outlook connection that has Drafts spiegeln on, the same draft also appears in your Outlook Drafts folder.
Mit KI antworten	Generates and sends an AI reply using your knowledge base
E-Mail senden	Composes and sends a brand-new outbound email to a contact or address — not a reply to the incoming thread. Useful for “alert sales when a hot lead arrives” flows. The body can be a fixed template (with `{{sender}}`, `{{subject}}`, `{{snippet}}`, `{{summary}}` placeholders) or AI-generated from a prompt. Goes out via your mailbox provider (with Outlook, a copy lands in your Sent folder).
Weiterleiten	Forwards the latest inbound message of the thread to a contact or teammate, with an optional note prepended. Delivered via the mailbox provider.
Benachrichtigung	Pings your team when this category matches — in-app, email, and/or a Slack/Teams webhook. Recipients are picked in a multi-select with avatars. See Notifications.
Webhook auslösen	POSTs the categorization + full email payload to a URL — see Webhook payload
Endgültig löschen	Hard-deletes the message (intentionally not surfaced in the UI by default)

E-Mail senden, Weiterleiten, and Endgültig löschen are destructive — the editor forces an explicit confirmation toggle before they can run, because sent or deleted mail can’t be undone. Conflicting actions are blocked at save time — you can’t combine Archivieren with Endgültig löschen (nor Endgültig löschen with Ticket erstellen, Mit KI antworten, E-Mail senden, or Weiterleiten), and the same action type can only appear once per category.

Suggest vs auto mode

Every action has a mode toggle: automatisch tun (the system runs it) or nur vorschlagen (the action waits in the inbox for an operator to approve or dismiss). Suggest mode is the safe default while you’re still tuning a category. Mit KI antworten is the one action that runs in both modes: in suggest mode it pre-generates a draft so operators can review and send with one click; in auto mode it sends without review. Antwort entwerfen always behaves like suggest mode (no auto-send) — it’s the “I want a draft waiting for me” variant.

Kontakt anlegen: add the sender as a contact

The Kontakt anlegen action finds or creates a contact for the sender (find-or-create by their email) and links it to the conversation. The name and role are auto-filled by the AI from the message and signature.

Contacts are no longer created automatically when an email arrives. A category only creates a contact if its action chain includes Kontakt anlegen. Categories without it (e.g. Spam, Newsletter, Zustellfehler) never create a contact — so you decide which kinds of senders become contacts.

Place it early in the chain — before Unternehmen recherchieren and Antwort entwerfen — because later actions build on the linked contact (the company research attaches to it, and the draft can reference it).

Unternehmen recherchieren

This action finds or creates the sender’s company in your CRM and scrapes its website into the company’s notes.

Research once by default. If the company already has research notes, the action skips the scrape and reuses what’s there. Toggle Bestehende Recherche aktualisieren on the action to force a fresh scrape on every run.
Needs a contact first. Kontakt anlegen must run earlier in the chain, otherwise the action is skipped at runtime (see Action order & dependencies).

Ticket erstellen

By default the ticket’s title and description are AI-generated from the email — you no longer set them manually. Leaving priority empty lets the AI decide it too. An optional fixed subject template override is available behind a disclosure if you want a constant title instead. When Unternehmen recherchieren ran earlier in the chain, that company research is handed to the ticket-generating AI as context, so the ticket reflects what’s known about the sender’s company. The ticket is linked to the contact and company.

Action order & dependencies

Actions in a chain run top to bottom and pass their results forward, so order matters:

Kontakt anlegen links the contact →
Unternehmen recherchieren writes the company research →
Antwort entwerfen, Mit KI antworten, and Ticket erstellen use that contact + research in their output.

The editor checks the order and warns you when it breaks a dependency:

Unternehmen recherchieren requires Kontakt anlegen before it. The editor shows a hard warning with a one-click auto-fix; if you ignore it, the research is skipped at runtime.
Antwort entwerfen, Mit KI antworten, and Ticket erstellen show a softer tip suggesting you add Unternehmen recherchieren before them to enrich their output.

Example pipeline: customer inquiry

A common Kundenanfrage pipeline chains four actions in this order:

Kontakt anlegen (auto) — adds the sender as a contact and links it to the conversation, so the later steps have someone to attach to
Ticket erstellen (suggest) — opens a ticket so the request is tracked
Unternehmen recherchieren (auto) — finds the sender’s company (using the LLM’s extracted company name + sender domain), scrapes the website with your custom prompt (once, unless Bestehende Recherche aktualisieren is on), writes a briefing to the company’s notes
Antwort entwerfen (auto) — generates a reply draft; because step 3 just ran, the draft prompt sees the freshly-written company notes alongside your agent prompt, knowledge base, contact notes, and operator profile

The full chain — new email → categorize → contact + company created + scraped → draft written — runs in ~10–20 seconds on a typical inbox.

Where the contact & company creation rules live

Kontakt anlegen is the only action that creates a contact, and Unternehmen recherchieren is the only action that creates a company row in your CRM. Categories that do not include them (e.g. Spam, Newsletter, Zustellfehler) will never auto-create a contact or company even if the LLM extracted a name. That’s the design — the pipeline is the gate against spam pollution. (Because Unternehmen recherchieren needs a contact first, put Kontakt anlegen ahead of it.) Matching rules:

Sender from a corporate domain (e.g. martin@bigtechcorp.com) → matches/inserts on (domain, name) strictly. sarah@bigtechcorp.com writing later links to the same row.
Sender from a free-mail provider (gmail.com, outlook.com, gmx.de, …) → matches on name only (domain stored as null). Two senders writing from different free-mail addresses about the same BigTechCorp resolve to the same company row.

If the LLM also extracted a domain/website from the body or signature (e.g. the footer mentions psquared.dev), that takes precedence over the sender domain — useful when a colleague writes from their personal Gmail but their signature has the real corporate domain.

Webhook payload

The Webhook auslösen action POSTs JSON to your configured URL with the full categorization + email context — including the sender, body, and any attachments. No follow-up API call needed for typical automations (file an invoice, post to Slack, kick off an n8n flow):

{
  "type": "categorization.action.webhook",
  "categorizationId": "f4da1a1e-…",
  "categorizerId": "a76f53a9-…",
  "accountId": "9ab33ff6-…",
  "subject": { "type": "email_thread", "id": "73975626-…" },
  "summary": "PDF-Rechnung für Juni im Anhang.",
  "reasoning": "Betreff, Text und Anhang deuten klar auf eine Rechnung hin.",
  "llmSuggestedAction": null,
  "email": {
    "threadId": "73975626-…",
    "chatId": "f3813072-…",
    "messageId": "AQMkAD…",
    "fromEmail": "office@example.com",
    "fromName": "Example GmbH",
    "toEmails": ["you@example.com"],
    "ccEmails": [],
    "subject": "Rechnung",
    "bodyText": "Rechnung Juni im Anhang. LG",
    "receivedAt": "2026-05-21T18:51:34+00:00",
    "attachments": [
      {
        "filename": "Rechnung 05-26.pdf",
        "mimeType": "application/pdf",
        "size": 25638,
        "url": "https://…supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/files/email-attachments/…/Rechnung%2005-26.pdf",
        "dataBase64": "JVBERi0xLjQK…",
        "truncated": false
      }
    ]
  },
  "firedAt": "2026-05-21T18:52:06.169Z"
}

Attachments in the payload

Every attachment carries three ways to access the bytes:

url — public URL, no expiry. Use an HTTP fetch node (e.g. n8n’s HTTP Request → File response) and stream the file straight into Drive / S3 / your endpoint. Works for every size.
dataBase64 — inline base64 content, populated when the file is ≤ 5 MB. Decode in a code node or use n8n’s Convert to File → Move Base64 String to File. Skip the HTTP round-trip entirely.
truncated — true only when the file is larger than the 5 MB inline cap. The dataBase64 field is omitted; use url instead.

filename, mimeType, and size are always present. The InboxMate categorizer LLM has already seen filenames + MIME types when deciding the category, so the summary and reasoning fields often reference them directly.

Signature header

Every webhook delivery sets an X-Categorizer-Signature header when the webhook is configured with a secret:

X-Categorizer-Signature: sha256=<hex>

Verify with HMAC-SHA256 over the raw request body using the secret you saved when creating the webhook action.

Notifications: in-app, email, Slack & Teams

The Benachrichtigung senden action tells your team when a category matched, without anyone watching the inbox. In the action panel you pick who and how:

Kanäle (how) — toggle any combination of:
- In-App-Benachrichtigung — the bell inside InboxMate.
- E-Mail — to the chosen recipients’ account emails.
- Slack / Teams (Webhook) — POSTs a message to an incoming-webhook URL you paste in.
Empfänger (who) — pick the workspace members to notify. Leave it empty to notify everyone with access to the mailbox. (Recipients apply to the in-app and email channels; the webhook always posts to its URL.)

Slack / Teams webhook

When you enable the Slack / Teams (Webhook) channel, a Webhook-URL field appears. Paste an incoming-webhook URL from either service — InboxMate detects which one from the URL and formats the message to match (a Slack message, a Teams Adaptive Card, or generic JSON for anything else). The notification includes the category, the email subject, the sender, and the AI’s one-line summary.

Microsoft Teams
Slack

Teams retired the old “Incoming Webhook” connector. The current way to get a URL is the built-in Workflows (Power Automate) app:

Open Workflows in Teams

In the Teams channel where you want the messages, click the ··· menu → Workflows, or add the Workflows app from the Teams app store.

Use the webhook template

Choose the template “Post to a channel when a webhook request is received.” Confirm the connection and pick the team + channel.

Copy the URL

Workflows generates an HTTP POST URL. Copy it.

Paste it into InboxMate

Paste the URL into the Webhook-URL field on the notify action and save. Microsoft’s full walkthrough: Create incoming webhooks with Workflows for Microsoft Teams.

The action panel links straight to that Microsoft guide, so you don’t have to leave the editor to find it.

The webhook is delivered the moment the category matches and is fire-and-forget — a bad URL or an error from Slack/Teams is logged but never blocks the categorization or its other actions.

Connected your mailbox via Outlook? Then you’re on Microsoft 365 and almost certainly use Teams — the Workflows webhook is the quickest way to route “hot lead arrived” or “invoice received” pings into the channel your team already watches.

Each categorizer is either private or shared, set with the Im Team teilen toggle on the categorizer (root) node:

Privat (nur du) — only the owner sees and runs it. Good for personal rules on a mailbox only you watch.
Mit dem Team geteilt — every workspace member sees it; only admins (and the owner) can edit it. Good for the shared support inbox where one set of rules should apply for everyone.

This pairs with mailbox sharing: a categorizer only acts on mailboxes within its Gilt für scope, and members only see categorizations for mailboxes they own or were shared. In a 2–20 person workspace the common setup is one shared categorizer per shared mailbox, plus private categorizers for individual inboxes.

Confidence behavior

The behavior preset controls how confident the AI has to be before it acts:

Preset	Match threshold	Auto-execute threshold
Vorsichtig	0.85	0.95
Standard	0.70	0.85
Aggressiv	0.55	0.75

Below the match threshold, the email lands in the inbox uncategorised. Between the two thresholds, actions are suggested but not auto-executed.

Scope

By default a categorizer runs on every connected mailbox plus inactive widget chats. Under Gilt für, restrict it to specific mailboxes by selecting their chips, or toggle the widget-chat scope off. Workspaces with multiple mailboxes (e.g., support + sales) often want one categorizer per inbox so each gets its own categories and actions.

Knowledge

Two knowledge inputs are available per categorizer:

Wissensquellen (immer mitgegeben) — up to 10 short knowledge entries injected into every prompt. Best for facts that are always relevant (return policy, business hours, escalation routing).
Wissens-Buckets (bei Bedarf durchsucht) — vector buckets the AI can call via search_knowledge if it needs more context to decide a category. Best for large knowledge bases.

See Data sources for how to build knowledge entries and buckets.

Activity log

The Letzte Aktivität section lists recent categorizations and the actions taken. Reversible actions (like archive) show a Rückgängig button so operators can undo a wrong call without leaving the page.

Plan availability

Categorizers are available on Pro and Business plans. Auto-mode actions (including Mit KI antworten set to auto) require Business.

EU model routing

Workspaces with EU-only processing enabled (Pro and Business) automatically route categorization through the EU deployment of GPT-4.1 or GPT-5-mini. No configuration needed — the routing happens transparently per request.

​How it works

​Categories

​Attachments are part of the signal

​Actions

​Suggest vs auto mode

​Kontakt anlegen: add the sender as a contact

​Unternehmen recherchieren

​Ticket erstellen

​Action order & dependencies

​Example pipeline: customer inquiry

​Where the contact & company creation rules live

​Webhook payload

​Attachments in the payload

​Signature header

​Notifications: in-app, email, Slack & Teams

​Slack / Teams webhook

​Sharing & access

​Confidence behavior

​Scope

​Knowledge

​Activity log

​Plan availability

​EU model routing

How it works

Categories

Attachments are part of the signal

Actions

Suggest vs auto mode

Kontakt anlegen: add the sender as a contact

Unternehmen recherchieren

Ticket erstellen

Action order & dependencies

Example pipeline: customer inquiry

Where the contact & company creation rules live

Webhook payload

Attachments in the payload

Signature header

Notifications: in-app, email, Slack & Teams

Slack / Teams webhook

Sharing & access

Confidence behavior

Scope

Knowledge

Activity log

Plan availability

EU model routing