The Sorting Room — Ravensbreath Lab

003 / SYSTEM DESIGN

A hundred emails a day, handled by a silent background layer that never touches the inbox everyone already trusts.

RoleWorkflow architecture & scoping

ForCommodity trading & logistics business

Year2026

ToolsNode.js · Microsoft Graph · Claude API · Asana

01 — THE PROBLEM

One person was doing the work of two, sorting roughly a hundred emails a day with no triage layer at all.

02 — CONSTRAINTS

What the system had to respect.

01Outlook, Teams, and Asana had to stay the primary interfaces — zero behavior change for either person

02Needed to run as a silent background layer, not a new tool to learn

03VIP senders route to Critical urgency regardless of content, no exceptions

04Fully scoped and documented before a line of code was written

03 — THE SYSTEM

A workflow people can follow.

Scope

The full architecture was documented before a line of code was written.

Poll

Microsoft Graph API polls the inbox continuously, with Outlook, Teams, and Asana staying the primary interfaces.

Classify

Claude Haiku handles classification and extraction; Claude Sonnet drafts replies in Phase 3.

Track

The first email on a thread creates a ticket, replies update it, and an Outlook reply auto-closes it via webhook.

Escalate

A VIP sender override routes specific contacts to Critical urgency regardless of content.

04 — DECISIONS

The choices that made it practical.

Decision 01

Nothing changes for the people using it.

Outlook, Teams, and Asana stay exactly where they are — the system runs underneath, silently.

Decision 02

Scope it before you build it.

The full architecture was documented up front, the same discipline a boutique agency engagement would charge for.

Decision 03

Certain senders don't wait on a model's opinion.

A VIP override forces Critical urgency regardless of what the classifier thinks.

05 — RESULT

A hundred emails a day, handled by a silent background layer that never touches the inbox everyone already trusts.

$10–15Estimated monthly cost to run

100Emails handled daily

$20–30KTypical agency value for a build like this

One person doing the work of two

A two-person commodity trading and logistics business was managing roughly 100 emails a day manually — no triage layer, no system, just one person carrying it with the second person possibly leaving soon.

The full architecture was scoped and documented before a line of code was written. The system runs as a silent background layer: Outlook, Teams, and Asana stay the primary interfaces, with zero behavior change required from either person. Microsoft Graph API polls the inbox continuously. Claude Haiku handles classification and extraction; Claude Sonnet drafts replies in Phase 3.

What this would cost from an agency

The open-market value for a build like this from a boutique agency runs $20,000 to $30,000 — discovery and scoping alone typically costs $2,000 to $5,000. This was fully architected for a fraction of that, with a monthly running cost of $10 to $15. Development is pending the client’s Azure portal access.

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