Inbox AI

Description

AI-Powered Inbox for Every Contact Form 7 Submission

Inbox AI uses AI to turn your Contact Form 7 submissions into something your team can actually work from — without modifying Contact Form 7 itself. Every submission is analyzed by your chosen AI provider and returned with a plain-language AI summary, an AI-suggested category and priority, a confidence score, and a ready-to-edit AI draft reply.

If you’ve ever dug through email notifications trying to figure out which submissions actually need a reply, Inbox AI’s AI layer solves exactly that problem — reading, categorizing, and prioritizing every message automatically, then handing you a focused, triage-ready queue instead of a plain list of messages.

Manage Contact Form 7 Submissions with AI:

• Unified AI Inbox: Every Contact Form 7 submission lands in one searchable inbox, instead of getting buried across scattered email notifications.

• AI-Generated Summaries: Each submission is read and summarized by your chosen AI provider, so you know what it’s about without opening the full message.

• Smart Category & Priority Suggestions: The AI suggests a category and a priority level (Urgent, High, Normal, Low) for every submission, along with a confidence score for each suggestion.

• Ready-to-Edit Draft Replies: Inbox AI drafts a reply for you to review and edit — never sent automatically, always in your control.

• Inbound Email Replies: When a customer replies to your emailed response, Inbox AI picks it up automatically — no matter what email platform they use — and threads it straight into the original submission’s conversation. The AI re-analyzes the full conversation and drafts a follow-up reply for you to review.

• Customer Mood Tracking: Every message in a conversation, from the original submission through each reply, is read for tone — positive, neutral, frustrated, or angry — with a short AI explanation, so an unhappy customer never slips by unnoticed.

• Powerful Search & Filtering: Search, filter, sort, and tag submissions by form, status, priority, category, or date, so nothing important gets lost.

• One-Click CSV Export: Export the current filtered view to CSV for reporting, backup, or import into another database or CRM.

• Bring Your Own AI Provider: Connect OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), or Google Gemini with your own API key — you choose the provider and control the cost.

• Zero Core Modification: Inbox AI reads from Contact Form 7’s public hooks only. It never edits Contact Form 7 core files or its mail handling.

Why Inbox AI?

Contact Form 7 is great at collecting submissions — but it doesn’t help you manage them. Inbox AI closes that gap: instead of a plain list of messages, every submission arrives already summarized, categorized, and prioritized, with a draft reply waiting for your review.

How Contact Form 7 (CF7) Inbox AI Works

1. A visitor submits one of your monitored Contact Form 7 forms.
2. Inbox AI stores the submission locally in your WordPress database.
3. Your connected AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini) analyzes it in the background and returns a summary, category, priority, confidence score, suggested mood, and a suggested reply.
4. You review everything in the AI Inbox screen and, when you’re happy with it, send the reply yourself. Nothing is ever sent to a visitor automatically.
5. If the customer replies to that email, Inbox AI’s optional inbound mail check picks it up automatically, threads it into the same conversation, and re-analyzes it so you always have a fresh summary and a new draft reply.

Who It’s For

• Small businesses and agencies using Contact Form 7 who want a real support inbox instead of scattered email notifications.
• Support and sales teams that want an AI customer support layer for day-to-day customer inquiry management, triaging contact form submissions by priority and category automatically.
• Anyone already using Flamingo to store Contact Form 7 submissions who wants AI categorization and an AI-drafted reply on top of that same data.

AI Features (OpenAI, Claude, or Google Gemini)

• Every AI-drafted reply is exactly that — a draft. It’s an AI email assistant for drafting replies, not an autoresponder; nothing sends without your review.
• If AI analysis fails for a submission, Inbox AI shows a clear failure state and lets you retry with one click instead of leaving a silent gap.
• A customer’s reply — from any email platform, not just ones with special integrations — is picked up automatically, re-analyzed with the full conversation in view, and gets its own suggested follow-up reply.
• Each message in a conversation gets a suggested mood (positive, neutral, frustrated, angry) with a short one-line reason, shown in a Customer Mood panel on the Submission Detail screen.

Contact Form 7 (CF7) Inbox & Submission Management

• Filter by form, status, priority, category, AI confidence, and date range, with full-text search across sender name, email, subject, and message.
• A per-submission detail screen shows the full AI analysis alongside an activity timeline — who did what, and when — closer to a support ticket than a plain message list.
• Manual “Mark reviewed,” “Archive,” and “Delete” actions, each gated behind its own WordPress capability.
• Unread submissions and fresh customer replies are visually flagged in the list (tinted row background, bold name, and a dot — blue for a new submission, amber for a reply, so you can tell them apart without opening either one), with a count badge on the “AI Inbox” menu item — cleared automatically as soon as you open that submission.

Not Just a Contact Form 7 (CF7) Database Plugin

Inbox AI stores every submission to a monitored Contact Form 7 form directly in your own WordPress database, the same way a dedicated Contact Form 7 database plugin would — so you don’t need to run one just to keep a local copy of your entries.

It isn’t a full replacement for a dedicated database add-on, though. Inbox AI doesn’t currently offer multisite-wide storage, capture or store form attachments, support generic CSV import with custom field mapping, or let you rename field labels — if your site depends on any of those specific features, a dedicated Contact Form 7 database plugin running alongside Inbox AI still makes sense.

Contact Form 7 (CF7) Contacts

• Every sender automatically grouped into a single Contacts row — a lightweight contact form CRM view built directly from your existing submissions, no separate import needed.
• Search plus category and priority filters, matching the main inbox.
• One click from a contact straight to every message from that sender.
• CSV export and an archive-based delete, so removing a contact never destroys the underlying message history.

Notifications

• Email and Slack notifications so your team knows when a new submission — or one flagged urgent by the AI — needs attention, keeping AI customer service response times fast.
• Optional Inbound Email Replies: point Inbox AI at a mailbox (IMAP) and it checks for customer replies on a schedule you choose — every 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
• An email alert as soon as a customer reply comes in (on by default), with a preview of the reply and a direct link to the submission — so you always know a reply has arrived without keeping the AI Inbox tab open.

Import & Migration

• A guided import wizard for existing Flamingo submissions, so switching from Flamingo to Inbox AI doesn’t mean losing your submission history.
• A CSV upload path for a Flamingo export, for sites that can’t run the direct import wizard.

Privacy & Security

• Your AI provider API key is encrypted in the database and only ever shown masked (e.g. sk-••••••7f2A) after saving.
• Custom WordPress capabilities control who can view, edit, reply to, delete, or export messages — no blanket admin-only access.
• No data reaches any AI provider until you’ve connected one and explicitly turned on at least one monitored form.

Performance

• AI analysis runs as a background AI workflow via WP-Cron — a visitor’s form submission is never delayed waiting on an AI response.

External services

This plugin sends submission data to a third-party AI provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini — chosen and connected with the administrator’s own API key in Settings → AI Provider, to generate a summary, category, priority, and suggested reply.

What’s sent, and when: on each monitored submission (or a “Retry”/”Regenerate” click), the message, subject, and sender name (as referenced by the prompt template) are sent to the selected provider’s API along with the configured prompt and the administrator’s own API key. If Inbound Email Replies is turned on, a genuine new customer reply is also sent for re-analysis — including the conversation so far (the original message plus any prior replies) — so the AI can draft an in-context follow-up. Nothing is sent until a provider is connected and at least one form is monitored. Only one provider is contacted per request — never a shared or proxy key; the site owner pays the provider directly.

• OpenAI — Terms of Use, Privacy Policy.
• Anthropic — Commercial Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.
• Google Gemini — Additional Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.

My Contributions

I actively contribute to the following WordPress plugins:

• Gutenberg – The WordPress block editor, developed by the WordPress team.
• AI – Brings AI-powered features like content summarization, alt text generation, and title suggestions directly into the WordPress Block Editor.
• ElementsKit – Advanced widgets, header/footer builder, and mega menu builder for Elementor.
• MetForm – Super flexible and easy-to-use form builder.
• ShopEngine – Your complete WooCommerce solution, built for Elementor.
• GutenKit – Build websites 10x Faster with ZERO coding in the Gutenberg Block Editor.
• PopupKit – Build exceptional popup for diverse needs within the WordPress block editor.
• TableKit – Make fully-customizable multipurpose table & generate data table within Gutenberg block editor.

Source Code

Compiled assets (build/admin/admin.js, build/admin/admin.css, build/cf7/category.js, etc.) are built from human-readable source via npm run build (webpack, through @wordpress/scripts).

The uncompiled source is public at https://github.com/theaminulai/inbox-ai — the canonical, always-up-to-date source for every compiled file shipped in this plugin.