Cobra · Productivity & ops
Audit & filtering of the Cobra inbox (Outlook)
Context
The hlahutte@cobra.fr inbox had accumulated noise (unfiltered Odoo catchall alias, weekly EDI, auto-confirmations, SharePoint shares) that was burying real urgent items. I needed a clear picture of the situation, a volume measurement, and a first round of filtering to regain control of the daily flow.
What was built
- Outlook web server rule
catchall: moves emails fromcatchall@cobra.frto a dedicated folder + marks as read, applied retroactively (~450 emails at the start) - Two Outlook Mac client rules (catchall TO + CC) as a backup (Outlook Mac doesn't support (To OR Cc) AND Account in a single rule)
- 30-day inbox audit split into 4 buckets: urgent without reply, direct archive, strategic to re-read, recurring patterns
- Real volume measurement (~15–18 sent/day, ~5–8 received after catchall) + list of unanswered urgent items (PROCAPITAL, Harman, Triangle, GPD…)
What was hard / unexpected
- On Outlook Mac, can't combine (To OR Cc) AND Account in a single rule → split into two rules
- The catchall bug came from an Odoo alias pointing to
newscobra.frinstead ofcobra.fr(Gandi rejection) — not an Outlook rule issue - The server rule doesn't seem to have processed the full history → check "Run rule now"
Stack
Outlook (Mac client + web), Exchange server rules, Odoo alias, read-only outlook_email_search tool on Claude's side, Fyxer for tagging.
What this illustrates
Empirical, surgical audit of a real system — Claude samples, measures, proposes, but it's the human who executes (the tool is read-only). Iterative method: Outlook Mac limits discovered through testing, each failure producing a useful rule.
Still to do
- Verify that the catchall server rule processed the 445 historical emails
- Add a Cc condition to the catchall web rule
- Create 3 quick-win rules (EDI Group Digital, "Confirmation required", calendar notifications)
- Process the backlog of ~14 identified urgent items