Ignore rules: keep newsletters and bounces away from the AI

What ignore rules do

Not every email deserves a reply. A real inbox is full of newsletters, receipts, system alerts, calendar notices, and bounce messages. If an AI agent drafts a reply to each of those, your review queue fills with noise and your monthly replies are spent on mail nobody would answer.

Ignore rules stop that before it starts. A rule describes mail that should be skipped. When a new message matches, inboxr files it under an Ignored tab and does nothing else with it. It is not classified, not sent to the AI, and no draft is written.

Sample data. Names and messages are fictional.

How a rule is built

Rules are set per mailbox. Each one has three parts:

1. What to look at: the sender's email address, the sender's domain, or the subject line.
2. How to match: "contains" or "equals".
3. The value: the text to look for.

A few rules cover most inboxes. Match a domain to skip everything from a newsletter service. Match an exact address to skip one noisy sender while still answering everyone else at that company. Match a subject to skip a recurring report.

What happens to mail when it arrives

1. Bounce check. Delivery-failure messages are recognized first and ignored (see below).
2. Your rules. The message is compared with the mailbox's ignore rules. A match sends it to the Ignored tab.
3. Everything else is drafted. Mail that passes both checks is classified and handed to an agent as normal.

Because the check happens before any AI work, ignored mail does not count toward your plan's monthly AI replies.

Bounces are handled for you

When an email you sent cannot be delivered, the receiving server sends back a failure notice. Replying to one is pointless, and replying automatically is worse. inboxr recognizes these notices as they arrive by three signals: the sender (addresses such as mailer-daemon and postmaster), the message format used for delivery status reports, and a short list of standard bounce subjects such as "Mail delivery failed" and "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender".

The detection is kept deliberately narrow. A real customer who writes "your delivery failed" in a subject line is not treated as a bounce on that phrase alone.

Bounce filtering is on by default for every mailbox and can be switched off per mailbox if you want to see those messages in your queue.

Auto-responders are treated differently

Out-of-office replies and other automated messages are not bounces, and sometimes they matter. inboxr still drafts for them and holds the draft for review, but autopilot will never send to an automated sender. That rule prevents a loop where two automated systems answer each other. If you would rather not see them at all, add an ignore rule on the subject, for example "Automatic reply".

Nothing is lost

Ignored mail is stored, not deleted. The Ignored tab of the review queue lists everything that was skipped, with the same search and timeframe filters as the rest of the queue, so you can check that a rule is not catching mail it should not. In your own mailbox, inboxr marks a message as read once it has stored it. It does not delete or move anything.

Clearing one-off noise

Rules are for patterns. For a single stray message that reached the queue, you can ignore or delete it directly from the queue without writing a rule. If the same kind of message turns up again, that is the sign to add one.

Tips for writing rules

• Prefer domains for bulk senders. Newsletter and notification services often rotate the address but keep the domain.
• Use "equals" when you mean one sender. "Contains" on a short value can match more than you intended.
• Be careful with subject rules. A customer can use the same words. Check the Ignored tab for a few days after adding one.
• Do not ignore your own customers' domains. If a partner sends both alerts and real questions from one domain, match the alert address exactly.

Who it is for

Any mailbox that receives automated mail alongside real conversations, which is nearly all of them. It matters most on shared addresses that have been signed up to services over the years. Ignore rules are part of a wider set of limits described under controls and audit. For the practice of sorting mail before answering it, see email triage in the glossary.