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Haden InstituteHaden InstituteHaden Institute — Guide

Inbox

Inbox is where email from the public meets the CRM. The Haden office inbox is watched by a background program called the Gmail intake agent. For every new email it receives, the agent:

  1. Classifies the message — new inquiry, applicant question, current student, billing, partner or vendor, or spam.
  2. Matches the sender to a contact in the CRM, or creates one if there is no match.
  3. Logs the message to that person’s Timeline so the office never loses the thread.
  4. Drafts a reply using the right tone for the category, and queues it on the thread.
  5. Routes the thread into the Inbox with a status of Needs review, Drafted, Sent or Archived.

Nothing is sent on its own. The agent writes drafts; a human reads and sends.

The screen

Section titled “The screen”
  • A Status selector up top — All, Needs review, Drafted, Sent, Archived. Default is All.
  • A Threads panel on the left: the sender’s name, the subject, the category (coloured by tone), when it arrived, and its current status.
  • A Detail panel on the right that opens when you click a thread. You see the message, the agent’s confidence in its classification (“Applicant · 92%”), the draft reply, and two buttons:
    • Mark as sent — closes the thread as handled.
    • Archive — files it without a reply.

Where the message belongs to a known contact, a View person link under the subject jumps to their record.

What the fake agent does today

Section titled “What the fake agent does today”

The CRM runs its adapters in fake mode by default (see Adapters and fake mode), which means the Inbox is powered by a deterministic classifier that uses keyword heuristics instead of calling the real Claude API. You can trigger a fixture message from the Demo page to see the whole flow work end to end. When the office is ready to switch to the real Claude-powered agent, that is one environment variable (AI_ADAPTER=anthropic); nothing else about this page changes.

When the agent is unsure

Section titled “When the agent is unsure”

The agent is deliberately quiet when it isn’t confident. If it can’t place the email in one of the known categories, it writes the thread as Unknown and skips the draft. A human then reads the message and files it by hand.

Next: Ping.