Work from your own mailbox

Some work never leaves your inbox. Someone asks a question, you mean to answer it, and three days later it’s still sitting there under forty newer messages.

Routario can take the first pass at that. Connect your own mailbox and it will read your mail into Memory, work out which messages actually deserve an answer, write each reply in your Drafts for you to check and send, and file the original away once the draft exists.

It cannot send, and it cannot delete. There is no send action anywhere in this set of steps, and archiving only moves a message — the original is always recoverable from your mail client. What you get is your inbox pre-sorted with the replies already written, not an assistant mailing your customers on its own.

Connect your mailbox

Go to Settings → Connections → Apps and connect either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

Whichever you connect, the steps below are the same ones. There is no Gmail version and an Outlook version to choose between — each step reads whichever account your workspace has, and reports which one it used. That matters if you ever move providers: your flows keep working.

Not the same as an intake address

This is your own mailbox — the address you already write from. It’s separate from the workspace intake address described in Receive email into a flow, where mail is forwarded to Routario. You can use both; they file into the same Memory.

Bring your mail into Memory

Add a Sync mailbox step. It has two settings worth knowing:

Setting	What it does
Mailbox	inbox or sent. One folder per step — run it twice to cover both.
Days to look back	How far back to fetch, 1–90 (default 7).

Each message it finds is filed the same way inbound mail is: the body becomes a document you can search, and each attachment becomes its own linked document.

Syncing the same window twice is free — a message already in Memory is recognised and skipped, and the step reports count_ingested and count_skipped separately so you can see which happened. That’s also what makes backfilling easy: widen the window, run it again, and only the genuinely new messages land.

Sync your Sent folder too

sent is not an afterthought. Your own sent mail is how Routario learns how you actually write — the register you use, how you sign off, how formal you are with which people. A draft written without it reads like a machine; a draft written with it reads like you on a normal day.

Most workspaces run two flows on a schedule — inbox every 15 minutes, sent every 30 — so there’s always fresh mail to work with. See Building an automation for putting a step on a schedule.

The one id you need

Every email Routario files keeps the Message-Id its sender stamped on it — a value like <CAF+abc123@mail.gmail.com>, visible in Memory on the filed message.

Hand that to any of the steps below and it finds the message in your mailbox for you. You never need to dig out Gmail’s or Microsoft’s own internal id, and you never need to know which of the two you’re on.

Draft a reply

Add a Draft a reply step:

Field
Message ID	the message you’re replying to
Body	the reply text
To / Subject	leave blank — both are read off the original
Reply to everyone	off by default; on sends the draft back to the whole thread
Source ref	an idempotency key — see below

The draft lands in your Drafts folder. Nothing is sent.

Always fill in Source ref, conventionally mail_thread:{{ message_id }}. It’s how the step recognises it has already drafted for this message: run the same flow twice and you get one draft, not two. It’s also the only way a draft can be found and tidied up later.

A worked body, written the way you’d actually send it:

Dobrý den, Evo,

děkuji za zprávu. V pondělí se ozvu s termínem.

Jakub

If the message isn’t in your mailbox any more, the step says so plainly — no message with Message-Id … in the connected mailbox — rather than drafting into thin air.

Clear the original out of the inbox

Add an Archive message step with the same Message-Id. By default it also marks the message read.

The two providers do this genuinely differently, and the step tells you which happened rather than pretending they’re the same:

	Microsoft 365	Gmail
What happens	the message moves to a folder	the INBOX label is removed
Give it a folder name	files it there	applies it as an extra label
The message id afterwards	a new one — Microsoft re-issues it on a move	unchanged

Neither deletes. The message keeps existing and you can put it back by hand.

Draft first, archive second

Only archive once the draft actually exists. Order it that way and an interrupted run leaves the message sitting in your inbox with nothing lost — the next run picks it up again. Archive first and you’ve cleared something nobody has answered.

Check back later

People answer their own mail. A draft you wrote on Monday may be pointless by Wednesday because you replied yourself from your phone.

Get mail thread answers exactly that. Give it a Message-Id (or a thread id, if you kept one) and it returns the conversation, plus has_own_reply — true when you’ve since replied on that thread yourself.

When you have, Delete a draft retires the one Routario wrote. It takes only the Source ref you used to create it — there is deliberately no field for a raw draft id. Hand it a reference it never created and it refuses outright without touching your mailbox: no agent-created draft found for this reference — refusing to delete an unknown draft. That refusal is the safety mechanic, not an obstacle — it’s what guarantees this step can never delete a draft you wrote.

Worked example: keep your inbox at zero

The whole shape, as one loop:

1. Sync mailbox (inbox, look back 2 days) — on a schedule, every 15 minutes.
2. Sync mailbox (sent, look back 2 days) — every 30 minutes, so your own voice stays current.
3. When a new message is filed, decide whether it actually deserves a reply. A real person asking something does; a receipt, a newsletter or a thread you’ve already handled does not. Ask an AI step to make the call, or hand the whole judgement to an agent — see Agents and approval.
4. For the ones that do: Draft a reply, with source_ref set to mail_thread:{{ message_id }}.
5. Then Archive message with the same Message-Id.
6. Twice a day, sweep: for each draft, Get mail thread — if has_own_reply is true, Delete a draft.

You open your mail to an inbox holding only what nobody has dealt with, and a Drafts folder of replies waiting for you to read and press send.

Put a person in front of the writes

Drafting and archiving are the two steps worth approving by hand while you build trust — you’ll see exactly what it wanted to write before it writes it. Keep a human in the loop shows how.

While you’re connected: reading your calendar

The same connection gives Routario your calendar. List calendar events returns what’s in a window — useful for a morning briefing, or for checking whether you’re free before offering someone a time.

Both the start and end of the window accept plain expressions: now, today, yesterday, tomorrow, a signed offset like +1d / -2h / +1w, a date like 2026-08-05, or a full ISO 8601 timestamp. Left empty it covers now through seven days ahead, up to 50 events (250 maximum).

Each event comes back with its summary, start and end, attendees, location and a link to open it. Repeating meetings are expanded into their individual occurrences, so a weekly stand-up appears once per week it actually happens.

Each bound is measured from now, not from the other

From=tomorrow, Until=+2d covers all of tomorrow. From=+1d would start at this time tomorrow — run at 5 pm, it silently skips tomorrow’s whole working day.

Putting things in your calendar

Create calendar event and Update calendar event write to the same calendar, Google or Microsoft 365, whichever is connected. Times are ISO datetimes; one with an offset (2026-09-21T14:00:00+02:00) lands at exactly that instant, and one without is read in your workspace’s timezone. On an update, only the fields you fill in change — except Attendees, which replaces the whole list.

Attendees get a real invitation the moment the step runs

There is no draft mode. Every output carries has_external_attendees — true when anyone is outside your own email domain — but by then the invite has already gone. For an agent that might invite outsiders, require approval on the write so it asks first; an agent that only books your own time needs no approval.

With no calendar connected, every calendar step says so rather than returning an empty day that looks like a free one. On Microsoft 365, a connection made before calendar writing existed asks you to reconnect once.

Where to go next

• Receive email into a flow — the other way mail reaches Routario: a workspace address you forward to.
• Send email from a flow — when an automation genuinely should send, rather than draft.
• Agents and approval — handing the “does this deserve a reply?” judgement to an agent, and approving what it proposes.