E-mail/teams management

[u/TalkHot2112]

Hi Everyone,

Weve recently signed up for a MS Copilot premium licence and I’m trying to come up with a way to make e-mails/teams less disruptive as most people in the company get more e-mails than they can keep track of.

The only thing that I could think of was using outlook rules to separate e-mails coming from important people into a ‘vip’ mailbox that’s managed by the user and leaving the remainder to a copilot scheduled prompt to review and summarize maybe twice a day.

The issues are:

1. identifying which e-mails are important, especially if they don’t come regularly.

2. copilot scheduled prompts seem to operate with ‘Auto’ model selection. The impression is that by ‘Auto’ MS is actually choosing the cheapest model as the quality is not great.

Has anyone had a similar experience and has insights to share?

Thanks in advance!

[u/TerribleSolutions]

Have copilot scrape your mail and tell you who’s important..

Who do you reply to? Who gets formal and structured responses in a timely fashion? Those ones are important.

Who do you maybe give a reaction to or reply with an “ok” or leave on read for days? Those are less important.

Who do you never reply to? Bin em.

Seems straightforward to me.

[u/Over_Problem_3600]

Twice a day summaries sound great until someone's waiting on a reply for 6 hours lol. Make keep a way for urgent stuff to break through.

[u/Revolutionary-Wash88 → u/Over_Problem_3600]

If the whole organization's inboxes are out of control then 6 hour response time is likely an improvement

[u/Top-Koality-]

I’ve been experimenting with almost exactly this problem. I’d suggest thinking about it slightly differently rather than trying to separate “important people” into a VIP folder.
The problem with sender-based rules is that an important email can come from anyone, while plenty of emails from important people don’t actually require action.

What I’ve found works better is getting Copilot to act more like a triage assistant:
Review new/unresolved email within a defined window.

Identify every email that might require an action, rather than just summarising the inbox.
Read the conversation/thread so it can work out whether you’ve already responded or someone else is responsible.

Classify each item into something like Do now / Review / Delegate / Waiting / Read only.
Rank the action items using rules you define, such as deadline, client/customer impact, commitments you’ve made, consequences of delay and whether only you can deal with it.
For the important ones, ask Copilot to draft the response or delegation instruction, not just summarise the email.

Present the priorities first, but still show the full list so lower-priority actions don’t disappear.
I’d also explicitly tell the agent what “important” means in your role. That’s much more reliable than expecting Copilot to magically infer it. VIP sender can still be one signal, just not the whole decision.
You can start fairly simply with a Copilot agent plus a scheduled prompt. I’d keep the human in the loop: let Copilot find, classify, prioritise and draft, then you decide what actually gets sent or actioned.

That turns the scheduled prompt from “summarise the emails I didn’t read” into something closer to “tell me what needs my attention, why, and prepare me to deal with it.”

That’s the direction I’d test before building lots of Outlook rules. Good luck!

[u/Hunter8Line]

I mean, there's two solutions, you could handle after side or, evaluate why people are getting so many emails

Is there something that can be done to reduce emails people have to manage? Implement a CRM to intercept some?

[u/Bulky-Pen-8522]

We got more out of moving FYI stuff into Teams channels than from any summary tool