The Email Skill in Cowork
Post 6 of 14
Introduction
Email is the workflow most people will try first. Cowork’s Email skill reads, drafts, and sends mail in Outlook on your behalf — with an approval prompt before anything leaves your tenant. The point is not faster typing; the point is delegating the whole loop, from triage to send.
Working the Email Loop End-to-End
What the skill can do.
- Triage and group your inbox by topic, urgency, or sender.
- Draft replies grounded in the original thread plus any attached files.
- Send messages, post follow-ups, and forward — each gated by an approval prompt with a risk indicator.
- Pull historical context across Email when preparing a new message.
A working prompt.
“Read my unread emails from the past 24 hours. Group them by project. For anything from the marketing team about the spring campaign, draft a reply summarising the latest results from the attached CSV and propose a 30-minute review next Tuesday between 10 and 12. Show me each draft before sending.”
Cowork loads the Email skill, retrieves the messages, builds the drafts, and then prompts you to send.
Approval anatomy. Before any send, Cowork shows the recipient list, subject, and body, plus a risk level indicator for medium- and high-risk actions. Choices: Send, Don’t ask again (scoped to this conversation only), or Cancel. Use Show parameters to see the full technical details.
Catch-up workflows. “Catch me up on the Acme account” pulls across mail, meetings, and Teams to produce a narrative brief. This is the Email skill working with Enterprise Search and Meetings — Cowork composes them automatically.
Cross-skill outputs. A common pattern is “summarise these threads, then create a PDF brief and email it to the team.” That single prompt invokes Email + PDF + Email again. Each step is visible; each external action is approved.
Limits worth remembering.
- Cowork cannot read encrypted Email even if you have access.
- Attachments must be under 200 MB.
- Cowork operates only on cloud-hosted mail (Exchange Online); local PSTs are out of scope.
A reusable pattern. Build a custom skill called morning-triage (post 5 covered the format) that always runs the same triage logic against your inbox at 7:30 AM via a scheduled prompt (post 8). This compounds over weeks.
Takeaway
The Email skill becomes valuable once you stop using it as a writing tool and start using it as a workflow handler. Brief Cowork with an outcome, approve the sends, move on.
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