Feature detail · Workflow
It runs while you're away
At 3 a.m., in the middle of a meeting. Owlu is a mail app with small pieces inside it — “Mail summary”, “Compose email” — and stringing three or four of them together gives you one automation. Below you'll watch four of them run, and then see exactly how each one was put together.
① Starts when mail arrives
A quote request lands,
the reply gets drafted, then it stops.
The most common automation starts from a single email. The signal is an address you chose — add one Condition & repeat piece if you also want to match on the word “quote”. Writing is automatic; sending stops and waits for you.
Re: Co-branded campaign — partnership proposal
The pieces you just saw
Nineteen pieces. That's the whole box
The four pieces that automation used came out of this box. Each piece does exactly one thing, and they run in the order you line them up.
Startone of fiveNot in the box — one gets attached the moment you make an automation
“Receive by organization” means it starts when mail comes from a company you registered; “Receive by AI inbox” means it starts when mail lands in a category the AI sorted.
Reading3 piecesWorks out what it's about
Gathering and counting3 piecesGathers what's scattered and folds it into numbers
Writing4 piecesProduces replies and reports from scratch
Clearing the inbox1 piecesActually moves mail to archive, trash, or spam
Putting things away3 piecesFiles the attachments, puts the meetings on the calendar
Handing it to a person2 piecesStops here and calls you
Sending it out1 piecesThe only piece that actually sends mail outside the company
Shaping the flow2 piecesMakes a fork, or ends it here
It looks like a lot, but one automation usually uses three or four. The one you just watched used four. Below we'll build three more — each one starting a different way.
The groupings are ours, drawn for reading; the piece names and colors are exactly what's in the app.
Snap them together yourself, or just say “when mail like this comes in, do this” — say it and the pieces get wired for you.
② Starts before a meeting
Ten minutes before,
you get a recap of where you left off.
Set the trigger to “10 minutes before” and you're done. Right as you walk in, the whole thread arrives folded into one card.
③ Starts at a set time
It runs alone at 3 a.m.,
and it's finished by morning.
Five pieces this time. Collect, count, write the report, ping you — all on one line.
④ Starts when you press it
Whatever you look up often,
make it a button.
①–③ run on their own; this one runs only when you press it. If you keep asking “where did we land with this client?”, wire that lookup into a button. Next time the question comes up, one press gives you the whole thing on a page.
Over the last five months, mail from Harbor Partners was mostly contract and scheduling updates, with replies only at key decision points. Daniel Park sits at the center of it, and inbound volume climbed toward the end.
How you build one
Not following?
Looks hard?
There are two ways to build one
No code. Ask for it in one sentence, or snap the pieces together like Lego — either way you end up with the same line.
Either way, you end up with the same line
This is the “Auto reply” template that ships with the app, unchanged. What you make by talking lands on the same canvas — so you can ask for it, then fix it by hand.
Already in the app
New to this? Just switch one on
You don't have to start from a blank canvas. Eight automation templates ship with the app. The names, descriptions, and piece lines below are exactly what you'll find in the app.
Auto replyEmailRight on the first screen
When email arrives, AI writes a reply and saves it as a draft.
Auto-classify newslettersEmailRight on the first screen
Automatically categorize and archive newsletter emails.
Auto-add meeting eventsProductivityRight on the first screen
Extract event details from meeting invitations and add them to the calendar.
Auto-save attachmentsFileRight on the first screen
Automatically save attachments from specific senders locally.
Daily reportProductivityRight on the first screen
Automatically generate a daily report of email processing status.
Web monitoringDataRight on the first screen
Periodically crawl web pages and save results to a datasheet.
Conditional forwardingEmail
Analyze email content and forward to the owner if conditions are met.
Bulk email sendMarketing
Send personalized bulk emails based on a datasheet.
Everything above is what already ships with the app — the names, descriptions, and piece lines were copied straight out of it. The word “datasheet” in those descriptions is the same thing as Database in the piece box (the app's own wording, only labeled differently). And you may have noticed: “Conditional forwarding” and “Bulk email send” carry no user approval — approval is an optional piece you add or drop, so if you want it to stop before sending, put a User approval into that line. 6 of them show up on the first screen of the automation builder and start on a click; the rest you pick from the template list. From here down these aren't the company's — they're what we built from the same pieces.
What else you could build
Same pieces. All of this.
From here on these don't ship with the app — we built them out of the same pieces. One row is one automation; the colored dots on the right are its pieces, and any row opens to show the description and the piece names. Look closely and plenty of rows differ by one or two pieces. That's the point — swap one and you have a completely different automation.
Starts when mail arrives16Receive by email address · Receive by organization
A quote request gets a reply draft and candidate meeting times, both ready. Sending still waits for you.
Propose event = pick times that don't collide with what's booked · drop the new one if it does
Starts when AI sorts it3Receive by AI inbox
Starts on a clock or a calendar6Scheduled run
Starts when you press it4Manual run
These are what we tried, and they aren't the end of it — wire the pieces differently and new automations keep coming. The colored dots on the right of a row are its pieces; a dashed square is a waiting or setting step like “wait for a reply”. “Two paths” marks a row where one automation splits in the middle and runs side by side — Condition & repeat has two exits, and you can merge the split lines back at Compose email (the way the app's own hint describes). The three marked “needs checking” are ones we think work, but we couldn't confirm in the app that the value actually reaches that piece. We'll drop the mark once we can. The rest follow the app's save rules (a Mail summary before events, recipients, attachments, and documents, a Compose or Edit email before Send email).
But what about the pile?
Clear the pile by hand, once.
After that, automatically.
Automations take what arrives from now on. You clear the few thousand already sitting there yourself, on screen — and the app points out which ones are worth clearing.
You pick through what's already there; automations take what comes next — two different jobs.
Leave one running tonight
Install it, connect an account, and the automation editor opens right away.
macOS 13+ · Windows · No credit card