Every 10 minutes
Flag and summarise emails from your VIP list
Emails from anyone on your Excel VIP list are flagged in Outlook and you get a short summary of each, so important messages never wait.
- Runs
- Every 10 minutes
- Apps
- Microsoft Excel, Outlook
- AI
- Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
- Access
- Mail.ReadWrite, Files.Read
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every 10 minutes, check my Outlook inbox for new emails from anyone in the VIPs table of my Excel workbook. Flag each one, and email me a one-line AI summary with what they need.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A managing director gets two hundred emails a day. Messages from the top ten clients, the bank and the board matter far more than the rest, but they look the same in the inbox and sometimes sit unread for a day.
Keeping the VIP list in Excel and flagging their emails as they arrive, with a short summary, means the important ones are seen first.
What you get out of it
Important emails seen first
Messages from the people who matter are flagged as they arrive.
Know what they need at a glance
A one-line summary says what each VIP is asking for.
An easy list to maintain
Add or remove VIPs in an Excel table; an assistant can keep it up to date.
Works with your existing inbox
Nothing moves; VIP emails are simply flagged in Outlook.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every 10 minutes, ClickRuntime reads your VIP list from the Excel table.
It checks your Outlook inbox for emails that arrived since its last check and matches the senders against the list.
Matching emails are flagged in Outlook.
AI writes a one-line summary of what each VIP needs, and the summaries are emailed to you.
Before it runs live
- Connect Microsoft Excel
- Connect Outlook
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
- Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Microsoft Excel and Outlook steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from clickruntime import on_trigger, report_fetched, http, credentials, ai, state, notify
def graph(method, path, **kw):
r = http.request(method, "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0" + path, headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.connection('microsoft', 'work')}"}, **kw)
return r.raise_for_status() or (r.json() if r.content else None)
BOOK = "/me/drive/items/your-workbook-id/workbook"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
since = state.get("since") or "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z"
msgs = graph("GET", "/me/mailFolders/inbox/messages", params={"$filter": f"receivedDateTime gt {since}", "$orderby": "receivedDateTime",
"$select": "id,subject,from,bodyPreview,receivedDateTime", "$top": 50})["value"]
if msgs:
state.set("since", msgs[-1]["receivedDateTime"])
vips = [str(r["values"][0][0]).lower() for r in graph("GET", f"{BOOK}/tables/VIPs/rows")["value"]] if msgs else []
hits = [m for m in msgs if any(v and m["from"]["emailAddress"]["address"].lower().endswith(v) for v in vips)]
report_fetched(len(hits))
if not hits:
return {"summary": "No VIP emails"}
lines = []
for m in hits:
graph("PATCH", f"/me/messages/{m['id']}", json={"flag": {"flagStatus": "flagged"}})
need = ai.generate(f"{m['subject']}\n{m['bodyPreview']}", system="In one line, say what this person needs.", max_output_tokens=60).text.strip()
lines.append(f"{m['from']['emailAddress']['name']}: {need}")
notify.email_me(f"{len(hits)} VIP emails", "\n".join(lines))
return {"vip": len(hits)}FAQ
Common questions
Can I add whole companies?
Where does the summary go?
Does it read my other emails?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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