PDG is a civil engineering firm in Las Vegas. We build practical AI tools to reduce repetitive work and spend more time on engineering. When something works, we clean it up and share it here, free.
Most of the time you spend "responding to email" isn't spent writing. It's spent digging through old threads, sent mail, and project folders for the information you need to respond. This tool does that part for you: it scans your Outlook inbox for emails you haven't answered, reads the full conversation and relevant project files, and prepares a reply draft using your normal greetings, phrasing, and level of formality learned from your own sent mail.
The core operating rule: draft only. The skill instructs Claude to save every response as an unsent Outlook draft. You review it, edit it, and decide whether to send or delete it. It is not designed to send email automatically.
The entire tool is one plain-text instruction file. Nothing hidden, no code to compile. Read the PDF to see every line of what it does, then download the zip and add it to Claude: Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill. You'll need a Claude plan with Cowork or Claude Code and the Microsoft 365 connector signed in to Outlook. Setup takes about 10 minutes: after uploading, just tell Claude "set up the inbox reply drafter" and it walks you through the rest.
Newsletters, calendar invitations, automated notifications, and conversations you've already answered are filtered out automatically.
If it can't verify a fee, date, commitment, or other important fact, it inserts a visible [CONFIRM] placeholder instead of guessing.
Emails and project documents are treated as information to analyze, never as instructions for the assistant to follow. Links inside incoming email are treated as suspicious by default and are never clicked.
Every email it evaluates is recorded, so you can audit exactly what it did and nothing gets drafted twice.
Run it when you want, or schedule it so drafts are ready and waiting when you sit down to review them.
Edit it or delete it. That's the design: a wrong draft costs you ten seconds, because nothing goes out without you.
Not this version. It's built on the Microsoft 365 connector. The approach would translate to other email systems. Feel free to modify it to suite your needs.
Yes. It's a text file. Adapt it to your firm's workflows and share it onward.
This tool can be modified to serve as an internal knowledge base where your entire team can ping it for Project Status update, summaries, project info etc.
Inbox Reply Drafter is the first tool we're releasing, not the last. We're cleaning up others we use internally.
Tools on this page are provided free, as-is, without warranty of any kind. They are not engineering services and create no client relationship with PDG. Review all skills for suitability, and every AI-generated draft before sending. Claude is a product of Anthropic; PDG is not affiliated with Anthropic (but it would be sweet if we were!)
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