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What InboxAgent does with each email (decisions)

Last updated 6 September 2026

After classifying an email, InboxAgent takes exactly one of four actions. You’ll see these as the outcome on each email and in your alert messages.

The four decisions

  • Create a lead — the email becomes a lead in your CRM (Zoho CRM or HubSpot), with the sender’s details and the email content attached. Repeat mail from the same conversation or sender updates the existing record instead of duplicating it.
  • Create a ticket — the email opens a ticket in your helpdesk (Zoho Desk or HubSpot); replies on the same thread are added to that ticket rather than opening new ones.
  • Send to review — the email is queued for a person on Manual review. This is the safe default whenever InboxAgent isn’t confident enough, when your rules say so, and always for Legal & Compliance mail.
  • Ignore — no action needed (marketing, notifications, auto-replies, spam, internal chatter). Ignored mail is still recorded, so you can always see it was looked at.

Decision vs outcome

The decision is what InboxAgent judged should happen. The outcome, shown in Inbox activity, is what actually happened — and the two can differ, which is exactly when the outcome is worth reading:

  • Handled — a lead or ticket was created, or a comment added to an existing one.
  • Needs your review — waiting on a person.
  • No action needed — deliberately filed: spam, newsletters, auto-replies, internal mail. If an admin has chosen to send one of those categories to Follow-ups, it reads Handled instead, because somebody now owns it.
  • Already handled — a duplicate, or a reply on a thread already being tracked.
  • Not delivered — the decision was made and could not be carried out. Usually delivery failed, meaning a connected CRM or helpdesk rejected it; those surface on Delivery failures and Failed messages. You may also see no CRM or helpdesk connected on older emails, from before leads and follow-ups had boards of their own.

A sales inquiry is Handled whether or not you have a CRM, because it goes on your Leads board either way. The same is true of a service request and the Follow-ups board. Not delivered is now rare: it means a genuine delivery failure, or an email processed before those boards existed.

There is also an internal processing status (Received / Processing / Completed / Skipped / Failed) on System logs and the detail panel. That is the pipeline’s own bookkeeping, not the answer to “what happened to my email” — use the outcome for that.

To see the exact action behind any email — including the CRM/helpdesk record it created or the error it hit — open the email’s detail panel, or use System logs.

How alerts relate to the outcome

A lead or ticket alert fires when InboxAgent detects it. Either way the work reaches a board of its own — Leads or Follow-ups — so the alert is your cue to go and work it. When you have one connected, the alert fires once the record is created (or matched to one that already exists); if that push genuinely fails, the alert is suppressed so you’re not told a record exists when it doesn’t, and the failure appears under Delivery failures. Review and mailbox alerts fire when that event happens.

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