Navigating the Workspace Inbox

Navigating the Workspace Inbox

Most grant teams juggle a separate email client alongside their grant tools — forwarding funder emails, copy-pasting updates, losing track of who said what. The Workspace Inbox brings email into the same place where you do your grant work, so correspondence and context live side by side.

When an email arrives, Grantable’s AI reads it, summarizes it, classifies it, and surfaces the right actions — all before you open the message. Instead of scanning a wall of emails, you scan a wall of summaries and tags.

Setting Up Your Inbox

Each workspace gets its own email address based on your workspace slug — something like your-org@inbox.grantable.co. To find it:

1. Click Inbox in the sidebar
2. Click Configure at the top of the inbox panel
3. Copy your workspace email address

The inbox opens as a panel on the right side of your screen — it doesn’t take you away from whatever you’re working on. You can have a conversation open in the main area and check incoming emails at the same time.

Two Ways to Get Email Flowing

Forwarding from your email client. Set up a filter in Gmail or Outlook that auto-forwards emails from key funders to your workspace address. RFP announcements and deadline reminders show up in Grantable automatically.

Subscribing directly with your workspace address. Here’s a power move: use your workspace email address to subscribe to funder newsletters and mailing lists. When a foundation announces a new funding cycle, that email lands directly in Grantable — where the AI can read it, classify it, and flag the opportunity before you even check your inbox.

What Happens When an Email Arrives

Each incoming email is analyzed by the AI, which does two things automatically:

• Summarizes the message so you can scan your inbox quickly without opening every email
• Classifies it into one of five categories: Opportunity (RFPs, funding announcements), Deadline (upcoming due dates), Correspondence (direct funder communication), Newsletter (digests and updates), or Noise (spam, auto-replies)

You can filter your inbox by any of these categories using the filter bar at the top — helpful when you want to see only opportunities or only deadlines.

Working With Inbox Messages

Click any message to open it in the inbox panel. From there you have several actions:

The “send to chat” action is one of the most powerful. When a funder sends you a complex RFP or a set of requirements, forwarding it into a conversation lets you immediately ask the AI to break it down, compare it to past applications, or start working on a response — all with the full email context loaded.

Inbox Rules — Automated Monitoring

Beyond reading and processing messages one at a time, you can set up rules that tell Grantable how to handle certain emails automatically. Click the lightning bolt icon at the top of the inbox panel to open the rules dialog.

Click + Add rule to create your first rule. Each rule has three parts: a name, a condition, and an action.

Naming Your Rule

Give the rule a descriptive name that tells you at a glance what it does — something like “Scan for opportunities” or “Monitor Gates Foundation.” You’ll see this name in your rules list, so make it specific enough that you can manage ten or twenty rules without confusion.

Choosing a Condition

The condition tells Grantable which emails this rule applies to. Click the condition dropdown to choose from three options:

• Classification is — triggers based on the AI’s automatic category. After you pick this, a second dropdown lets you choose which category:

• From address contains — matches the sender’s email address or domain. Enter something like sunrisefoundation.org to catch all emails from that organization, or a specific address like grants@example.org.
• Subject contains — matches keywords in the subject line. Useful for catching emails about specific programs, like “Community Health Initiative” or “SBIR.”

Choosing an Action

The action tells Grantable what to do when an email matches the condition:

• Auto-analyze — opens a chat session automatically and has the AI analyze the email against your organization’s profile and documents. This is the most powerful option — the AI reads the email, evaluates whether it’s relevant to you, and surfaces its analysis.
• Notify only — sends you a notification so you know the email arrived, but doesn’t trigger an AI analysis. Good for emails you want to see but handle yourself.
• Ignore — classifies and stores the email silently. No notification, no analysis. Use this for routine emails that clutter your inbox.

The Funder Newsletter Trick

Here’s where the inbox becomes a proactive research tool, not just a reactive one. Say you’re tracking the Sunrise Foundation. They send a quarterly newsletter announcing new funding priorities and RFPs.

1. Subscribe your workspace email address (your-org@inbox.grantable.co) to the Sunrise Foundation’s newsletter
2. Create a rule — name it “Scan for opportunities,” set the condition to “From address contains” with the funder’s domain, and set the action to “Auto-analyze”

3. Let it work — next time the Sunrise Foundation sends a newsletter, the AI reads it, checks for grant opportunities relevant to your organization, and starts a conversation with its analysis — before you’ve even seen the email

Scale this across ten or twenty funders and you have an AI-powered opportunity scanner running in the background. You’re no longer waiting for someone on your team to spot a new RFP — Grantable catches it and brings it to your attention.

We cover inbox rules in depth in Workspace Inbox Actions. For the strategic approach to building a full funder monitoring system, see Funder Monitoring.

Next Lesson

Your workspace is fully set up. In the next module, we’ll dive into Discover — finding and evaluating the right funders for your organization.