Inbox Management
Set Up Text Alerts for Urgent Emails in About a Minute
Most email notifications are noise, so people turn them off and then miss the one message that mattered. This walkthrough sets up the opposite: an AI assistant that watches every inbox you own and sends a text only when something is genuinely important. Setup takes about a minute. Create a Carly account, add all of your email addresses on the Integrations tab, work, personal and the old business one, and register your phone number under SMS. Then ask for the workflow in one sentence, by emailing Carly directly or from ChatGPT or Claude: text me when an urgent email arrives. There is a prebuilt template with that name, so you can copy its prompt straight out of the workflow library. What gets built is an incoming-email trigger on Gmail or Outlook, an AI triage step that reads the message in context, a filter that decides whether it is worth a text, and only then the SMS. Urgent means a real person waiting on you, a hard deadline, money, or a problem already in progress. Everything routine stays silent and waits in the inbox. Because the workflow runs on Carly's side, on the email arriving, it reaches you when you are nowhere near a chat window.
Step by step
- 01
Create the account
Go to usecarly.com and sign up. Carly is where the inboxes, the phone number and the workflow all live, so it is the only account you need for this.
- 02
Add every inbox
Open the Integrations tab and add all of your email addresses, Gmail or Outlook. Work, personal, the old business address that still gets real mail. Every one of them runs through the same triage.
- 03
Register your phone
Add your number under SMS. Texts only ever go to your own registered number, so there is nothing to configure about recipients.
- 04
Ask for the workflow in one sentence
Email Carly directly, or ask from ChatGPT or Claude: text me when an urgent email arrives. The prebuilt template is called "Text me when an urgent email arrives" and you can copy its prompt straight out of the workflow library.
- 05
Know what counts as urgent
A real person waiting on you, a hard deadline, money, or a problem already in progress. Newsletters, receipts, promotions and thread noise stay silent and wait in the inbox.
- 06
Understand why it fires with no chat open
MCP has no trigger and no scheduler of its own, so an assistant only acts while you are talking to it. This workflow runs on Carly's side, started by the email arriving, which is why it reaches you away from your desk.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."