PQS 65 (B) - prompt from www.reddit.com

The prompt

If you deal with:

* client emails
* invoices / payments
* internal team threads
* random newsletters
* and constant is this urgent? decisions this might be useful.

I was spending \~25–30 min every morning just sorting emails. Not replying. Just deciding: is this urgent? can it wait? do I even need to care? So I built a small n8n workflow instead of trying another Gmail filter.

Flow is simple:

Gmail trigger → basic rule pre-filter → LLM classification → deterministic routing. First I skip obvious stuff (newsletters, no-reply, system emails). Then I send the remaining email body to an LLM just for classification (not response writing). Structured output only.

Prompt:

 You are an email triage classifier.
 
 Classify into:
 - URGENT
 - ACTION_REQUIRED
 - FYI
 - IGNORE
 
 Rules:
 1. Deadline within 72h → URGENT
 2. External sender requesting action → ACTION_REQUIRED
 3. Invoice/payment/contract → ACTION_REQUIRED
 4. Informational only → FYI
 5. Promotional/automated → IGNORE
 
 Also extract:
 - deadline (ISO or null)
 - sender_type (internal/external)
 - confidence (0-100)
 
 Respond ONLY in JSON:
 {
 "category": "",
 "deadline": "",
 "sender_type": "",
 "confidence": 0
 }
 
 Email:
 """
 {{email_body}}
 """

Then in n8n I don’t blindly trust the AI. If:

* category = URGENT → star + label Priority
* ACTION\_REQUIRED + confidence > 70 → label Action
* FYI → Read Later
* IGNORE → archive
* low confidence → manual review

What didnt work: pure Gmail rules = too rigid pure AI = too inconsistent AI + deterministic layer worked. After \~1 week: \~30 min → \~10–12 min but the bigger win was removing \~20 micro-decisions before 9am. Still tuning thresholds. Anyone else combining LLM classification with rule-based routing instead of replacing rules entirely?