How to Automate Gmail

Gmail is still where the work arrives

Gmail is the mail service in Google Workspace, and for most businesses it is still the front door. Orders arrive in it. Quotes get requested in it. Suppliers confirm things in it. The customer who is about to leave writes to it first, usually politely.

It is also, in practice, the system of record for everything that never made it into a proper system. The agreed price is in a thread. The change to the delivery date is in a thread. The reason a discount was given four months ago is in a thread somebody will spend twenty minutes finding.

Everything downstream of it depends on a person reading each message, working out what it needs, and going somewhere else to do it. That last step is where the day goes.

The inbox is a to-do list written by other people

An inbox is the only queue in the business that anyone in the world can add to.

So the morning goes like this. Read a message. Open the CRM to check whether this is already a customer. Open the ordering system to see whether the thing is in stock. Copy an address into a form. Type a reply that says roughly what you typed yesterday to somebody else. Mark it read. Next one.

The reading is the quick part. The looking things up is what takes the hour. And the replies that end up delayed are almost never the difficult ones. They are the ordinary ones that needed a number from a system nobody had open at the time.

Gmail

Replies waiting in drafts The ordinary answers written overnight, with the tracking number, the stock level or the price already looked up.

The lookup done first The four tabs someone opens to answer one message, opened and read before anybody has seen the message.

Nothing sent without you Email cannot be recalled, so the default is a draft sitting in your folder rather than a message already gone.

Filters sort mail, they cannot answer it

Gmail does more on its own than most people ever set up.

Filters route by sender, subject or content, apply labels, skip the inbox and forward automatically. Canned responses keep you from retyping the same paragraph for the hundredth time. Smart Compose finishes sentences. Schedule send holds a written message until a time you pick. Workspace adds shared inboxes and delegation so a team can work one address without stepping on each other.

All of that acts on the message: where it goes, what it looks like, when it leaves. None of it can find anything out. A filter cannot check whether that customer has an unpaid invoice, whether the part is in stock, or what you quoted them in March.

Which is why the reply still waits for a person. Not because the words are hard, but because the facts live in four other places.

The reply can be written before you open the thread

The facts an ordinary reply needs are all on screens somebody could open. When they arrive on their own, the ordinary reply stops being work.

A supplier asks whether you want to reorder. The stock level is in the ordering system, last quarter's usage is in a spreadsheet, and the answer is one sentence. A customer asks where their order is. The status is on a courier site, behind a reference number sitting in the original confirmation email.

A prospect asks for a price on the thing you quote fifteen times a week, where the number depends on two values you look up. Someone asks to move a visit, and the answer depends on what the calendar says about Thursday.

Every one of those is a lookup and a paragraph. Both can happen before you sit down, with the result left in your drafts folder for you to glance at and send.

Hold one line, though: drafted, not sent. Email goes to real people and cannot be pulled back. A draft costs two seconds to approve and removes the entire category of things you would rather had not gone out on their own.

The drafting happens overnight

The number that belongs in the reply is sitting in another system, and getting it out is typing, not thinking. Fetching it does not have to be your job, and it does not have to wait until after you have read the email.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It reads the thread, opens whatever holds the answer, whether that is your CRM, a supplier portal or a courier site with no integration at all, and leaves a reply in your drafts with the details already filled in.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment. Nothing goes out on its own unless you deliberately set a narrow rule that says so, and you can watch a run and stop it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one shows the steps it takes.