Email assistant
A serverless email assistant on AWS that triages your inbox, drafts replies from your own knowledge, and escalates anything beyond its remit to a human. Seven posts on the same system — one diagram at a time — with an engineering reference at the end.
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01
An email assistant on AWS for a few dollars a month
The whole system on one page — a reader, a brain, a sender, and the four moves they share for every inbound email.
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02
How an email enters the assistant
Three lanes at the door: auto-archive for newsletters and bots, AI-handle for normal mail, direct escalate for the people you always want to see.
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03
How the assistant reads an email
Strip the noise — quoted threads, signatures, footers — and what’s left is the real message. The brain only sees the clean version.
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04
How the assistant decides what to do
Four tools, one pick per email: answer directly, draft for review, escalate to a human, or archive without replying. The AI is allowed to be confident or to defer — never to invent.
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05
How a reply stays accurate
Every auto-reply cites a passage from your knowledge file. No citation, no auto-send. Borderline confidence routes to a draft you approve in seconds.
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06
What the email assistant costs
A coffee a month at SMB volume. Cents per email, scaling smoothly with how often the inbox rings.
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07
Engineering reference: the email assistant architecture
Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, resource identifiers, region, Bedrock model IDs.