Triage your inbox by deal impact
AI email triage is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
AI email triage is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
AI email triage is worth having only when it sorts by consequence rather than by recency: what blocks a deal, what someone is waiting on you for, and what can be read at the end of the week.
| name | email-rules |
|---|---|
| description | Rules for subject lines, length, structure and calls to action in outbound and reply emails, including when not to send at all. Use whenever drafting or reviewing an email. |
| allowed-tools | none — this skill adds judgement, not reach |
| compatibility | Zealos, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any client that reads SKILL.md |
| license | Free to use and edit |
--- name: email-rules description: Rules for subject lines, length, structure and calls to action in outbound and reply emails, including when not to send at all. Use whenever drafting or reviewing an email. --- # Email rules ## Length Under 120 words. Outbound: under 90. If it does not fit, the ask is not clear enough yet. ## Subject lines - 4–7 words, lowercase or sentence case. Not Title Case. - Say the subject, not a tease. "Pricing for 40 seats" beats "Quick question". - Never fake a reply with "Re:". - No emoji, no "[URGENT]", no personalisation tokens visible in the subject. ## Structure 1. **One line of why-you**, specific enough that it could not be sent to anyone else. If it could, delete it — a generic opener is worse than none. 2. **The point**, in one or two sentences. 3. **One ask.** A question they can answer in a sentence, or a specific time. No signature block essay. No attachment on a first email. ## Calls to action Ask for a reply, not a meeting, on a first touch. "Worth a look?" outperforms "Do you have 30 minutes Tuesday?" because the cost of answering is lower. ## When not to send - Nothing has changed since the last email. - You are following up on a follow-up with no new information. - The recipient is on a thread where someone else owes the reply. - The message exists to make the sender feel productive. A skipped email costs nothing. A fourth "just bumping this" costs the account.
Two hundred unread becomes six that block a deal. The rest is still there, just no longer competing for the first hour of your day.
Investor, customer and candidate threads stop being one undifferentiated pile, and the two you actually owe a reply to are named rather than found.
A quiet account that suddenly has three threads open surfaces as a risk signal rather than as three separate emails you answer politely and forget.
Filters sort by sender and keyword. Triage sorts by consequence, which requires knowing which accounts are in play and who is waiting on whom — context a rule cannot hold.
Only if the agent has that tool and you have approved it. Most teams run triage read-only for a fortnight before letting it touch anything.
Yes, and the needs-a-reply-from-someone-else split is more useful there than anywhere else.
Post-call automation turns a recorded conversation into the three things that outlive it: the commitments each side made, the fields that changed, and the follow-up that has to go out today.
/call-recap-formatA pre-call brief is worth writing only if it changes what you ask: who is in the room, what they are measured on, what happened last time, and the one question you cannot afford to leave without answering.
/discovery-questionsCRM data hygiene survives AI only if one rule is written down first: a field left blank is a known unknown, while a field filled in by inference is an unknown unknown that will be reported on as fact.
/crm-field-conventionsQualification is a claim about evidence, not a score: a deal is qualified when every criterion has a source you can quote, and unevidenced criteria are named rather than filled in optimistically.
/meddiccA follow-up gets a reply when it opens with the specific commitment made on the call, stays under 120 words, and asks for exactly one thing the recipient can answer in a sentence.
/email-rulesA writing-voice skill is the highest-leverage thing you can give an AI, because it changes every sentence the product produces and it needs no tools, no integrations and no data.
/our-writing-voice