Concept
What is email intent detection?
Email intent detection classifies what a reply means — confirm, decline, question, and so on — so a plain-English human reply becomes a decision your code can act on without a person reading it. It's the step that turns “yeah that's fine, go ahead” into a structured confirm your app can branch on.
The intents ReplyFlow tags
Every parsed message carries exactly one intent:
confirm— the sender is agreeing or approving (“yes”, “sounds good”, “approved”).decline— the sender is declining or refusing (“no thanks”, “let's not”).question— the sender is asking something that needs an answer.unsubscribe— the sender wants out (“stop emailing me”, “remove me”).out_of_office— an automatic away/vacation reply.reply— the default when none of the above clearly apply.
Why it matters
Without intent, every reply is just free text you have to read or run through your own classifier. With it, whole flows collapse to a single branch. A “reply YES to confirm” email becomes one if intent === "confirm". An unsubscribe can be honored automatically. An out_of_office can be ignored so it doesn't trigger a follow-up. And for AI agents, a human's free-text approval becomes a safe, structured decision the agent can act on.
Where it fits
Intent is one field in the parsed message ReplyFlow delivers to your webhook — alongside the sender, the cleaned text, and the thread id. It's also the mechanism behind reply-to-confirm and human-in-the-loop approvals: when you ask a person to approve something by email, their reply is intent-tagged and the approval resolves to confirmed or declined automatically.
Frequently asked
Can I act on intent without reading the email?
Yes — that's the point. Your webhook receives the intent with each message, so you branch on it in code. You can still store or show the full text when you want a human in the loop.
What happens with an ambiguous reply?
When no specific intent clearly applies, the message is tagged reply — a safe default that means “a genuine response, not one of the special cases.” You can route those to a person.