Email Triage

TabMail analyzes your inbox and suggests the right action for each email—archive, delete, or reply.

The key idea is simple: use Table View as your dedicated triage view to process quickly (including Tab actions), then switch back to the familiar Card View for day-to-day reading.

Suggested actions

As emails arrive, TabMail classifies them into a few simple categories:

  • Reply — Emails that need your response
  • Archive — Informational emails to save but remove from inbox
  • Delete — Unwanted emails, spam, or newsletters you don’t read

Each email displays a visual tag showing its suggested action.

Triage view vs. familiar view

You can toggle between views from the message list view menu:

Table View (triage view)

This is the fastest “process the inbox” workflow:

  1. Select an email in your inbox
  2. Press Tab to execute the suggested action
  3. Move to the next email and repeat

When you’re done, switch back to Card View to read and work normally.

Card View (familiar view)

This is what most people are used to: a relaxed, readable message list for everyday use.

You can still triage here (for example, by clicking the suggested action for the selected message), but most people will be fastest when they temporarily switch into Table View to clear a batch, then switch back.

Inbox as a todo list

For most people, the inbox works best when it only contains active items:

  • Keep emails you still need to act on (reply / follow up / schedule / decide).
  • Archive or delete everything else so it stops stealing attention.

In other words: treat your inbox like a lightweight todo list, and let TabMail help you clear everything that isn’t actionable.

Large inbox behavior

TabMail works best with a focused inbox. When your inbox contains more than 100 emails, TabMail adjusts its behavior:

  • Tag-based sorting is disabled — The message list defaults to date-based sorting instead of sorting by action tags. This keeps the UI responsive on large mailboxes.
  • A one-time archive prompt appears — TabMail offers to help you archive older emails so you can get back under the limit and re-enable tag sorting.

You can also manually archive old emails at any time from Settings → Archive old emails or by rerunning the Welcome Wizard. Once your inbox is back under 100 emails, tag-based sorting activates automatically and the full triage workflow becomes available.

Visual indicators

Tagged emails show colored indicators:

  • 🟢 Green — Reply suggested
  • 🟡 Yellow — Archive suggested
  • 🔴 Red — Delete suggested

Hover over an email to see a brief AI-generated summary of its contents.

Improving suggestions

TabMail learns from your behavior:

  • You can teach TabMail rules (see Teachable tags)
  • Over time, suggestions become more accurate for your email patterns

Privacy

Email content is processed transiently for AI features and is not retained. You can always disable AI features at any time with a single toggle in your settings. For more details, see Privacy Policy.

Last updated: March 30, 2026