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Sort mail automatically in Ultimail: rules, labels, and AI sorting

Step-by-step guide to organizing your Ultimail inbox: unified labels, inbound sorting rules, webhooks, and LLM sorting, without letting the inbox become a warehouse.

5 min readThe UltiSuite team
Illustration of an organized mailbox with colored labels and an automatic sorting funnel

We have deployed Ultimail for teams receiving 200-400 mails per day across three addresses. The pattern that works is not "one magic rule", it is a simple hierarchy: labels first, then deterministic rules, then LLM branches for spam and urgent items.

Before creating rules: structure labels

Ultimail labels are unified: the same "Invoices" label can apply to mail received at contact@ or accounting@. That is the foundation of all automatic sorting.

  1. Open Ultimail → gear icon → Réglages (or directly /mail/settings).
  2. Section Libellés et dossiers → Libellés tab.
  3. Create the following labels (colors optional):
LabelUse
FacturesVendors, PDFs to pay
ClientsInbound requests, quotes
NewslettersMonitoring, SaaS tools
InterneTeam, HR, management
À traiterHuman queue

Do not create 40 labels on day one. Five are enough for 90% of flows. You can refine after two weeks of observation.

Rule #1: known senders → direct label

Most common case: invoices always arrive from the same domains.

  1. Réglages → Automatisations → Règles tab (/mail/settings/automation).

  2. Click Nouvelle règle.

  3. In the workflow editor:

    • Trigger: "À la réception d'un message"
    • Condition: sender contains @stripe.com OR @ovh.com (adapt to your vendors)
    • Action: Apply label Factures
    • Action (optional): Remove from inbox (visual archive)

  4. Name the rule Factures, fournisseurs connus, priority 10, enable the toggle.

Ultimail automations screen with Règles tab and Nouvelle règle button
Mail rules are configured in Réglages → Automatisations → Règles.

Repeat for your client domains (@important-client.fr → Clients label). Rules run server-side: even if your browser is closed, sorting continues.

Rule #2: newsletters → label + archive

Newsletters clutter the inbox but remain consultable. The rule editor cannot yet target a precise HTTP header, we rely on reliable text signals:

  • Condition (OR branch): subject contains newsletter OR subject contains digest OR body contains unsubscribe OR sender contains @substack.com (add your usual sources)
  • Actions: label Newsletters + archive

Rule #3: LLM branch for spam and urgent items

The workflow editor offers an Vérification LLM (llm_check) node: it is not yet a free classifier that returns an arbitrary label. Today it serves as a yes/no fork on targeted cases, spam or urgency detection per prompt.

Concrete example:

  1. Automatisations → Fournisseurs IA tab: configure an OpenAI-compatible endpoint (prepares integration; the engine is evolving).
  2. Create a priority 50 rule:
    • Trigger: on receipt
    • LLM node: prompt containing the word spam (e.g. "Is this message spam?")
    • Yes branch → Marquer spam action
    • No branch → another LLM node with urgent in the prompt → yes branch → label À traiter + Marquer important

Webhook: notify Slack when a "Client" mail arrives

Ultimail can POST JSON to an external URL on each match.

  1. Automatisations → Webhooks tab → create a Slack-type webhook (JSON template provided).
  2. Dedicated rule: Clients label applied → trigger webhook slack-clients.

Useful for a sales team that does not live in mail but wants a ping on inbound leads.

Verify it works

StepAction
1Send a test mail from an external address
2Open the simulator in the rule edit dialog (below the workflow editor)
3Check the label in the list after sync (a few seconds)
4Check admin logs if a rule does not match

If nothing happens: the rule may be inactive, or a higher-priority rule already modified the message.

Mistakes we see often

Too many rules stepping on each other. Solution: document priorities and test with the simulator.

Labels created on the fly in each rule. Solution: create the label first in Réglages → Libellés, then reference it.

AI on 100% of the flow. Solution: reserve LLM nodes for binary cases (spam, urgent); keep the rest deterministic.

Forgetting multiple accounts. Unified labels solve this, one rule applies to all accounts attached to the Ultimail account.

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