Part of Orca
Orca Autopilot · The engine behind the Inbox
Triage that waits for your yes. Nothing marked read. Nothing sends itself.
Autopilot is what works your mail between the times you look at it. New email goes through two passes: a rules pass that drops the noise, then Claude reading what is left properly, with your CRM, the thread history and your own tone to hand. What comes out is a draft reply where it is confident, a decision card where it is not, and a scheduling thread where someone is trying to book time. Every one of those waits for you.
Runs on your machine against your connected mailboxes. Two rules it never breaks: it does not mark your mail as read, and nothing is sent without your approval.
Two passes, then a person.
The cheap pass removes most of the volume. The expensive pass only reads what might matter. You only see what needs a human.
Rules first
A built-in list of newsletter, notification and platform senders, plus your own ignore rules by sender, domain, keyword, subject pattern or header. Those emails are left alone. They still arrive in your inbox as normal.
Then a proper read
What survives goes to Claude with context: who the sender is in your CRM, what the thread has said so far, how you write. Out comes a classification, a priority, and where it is confident enough, a draft.
What happens to a morning's mail
Most of it never needs you. The rest arrives sorted.
Here is the same batch of email, before and after. The ignored ones are still in your inbox, untouched and unread. They just are not on your list.
Your mail is never marked read
Autopilot reads a message to triage it, and leaves the unread state exactly as it found it. Open Outlook or Gmail afterwards and you see what you would have seen anyway. That was a hard rule from the first version and it has not moved.
Nothing sends itself
A draft is a draft until you approve it, in the thread, in Today, or from Telegram. Decline a meeting, confirm a slot, send a chase: same thing. The only exception is out-of-office mode, which you switch on yourself, and even then every reply it sends is listed for you on your return.
The dashboard, panel by panel.
Each panel is one kind of thing Autopilot produces or one kind of rule it follows. Plain names, because you look at this before coffee.
Drafted for review
Replies Orca has written and is holding. Send, Edit or Discard. Edit takes an instruction ("shorter, and drop the second paragraph") and redrafts.
Needs your decision
When Orca isn't sure how to handle an email, it waits here for you instead of guessing. Draft reply, Schedule reply, Hide sender, Hide domain, or Dismiss.
Follow-ups for review
Follow-ups Orca has drafted after meetings, from the transcript, plus the weekly chase reminder for things that went quiet. Same approval as everything else.
Scheduling in-flight
Threads where someone is trying to book time. Orca checks your calendars, proposes or confirms slots, reads the counter-offers. You approve, qualify with questions, or decline.
Hidden from Orca
Your ignore rules: sender, domain, keyword, subject pattern, header. Each one shows how often it has fired. Add a sender here and Orca leaves them alone; their mail still arrives as normal.
Calendar rules and review
Auto-decline by sender or by subject. And a review list of what calendar hygiene found: double bookings, invites that look low value, blocks you might want treated as free.
Out of office
Go away. Come back to a list, not a pile.
Switch on out-of-office mode and Orca replies for you while you are gone, then lists every handled email in one panel, On your return, so you can catch up in one place. Each row says what came in and what Orca said. Mark it done, or pick it up where Orca left it.
- You switch it on. Out-of-office is a mode you choose, not something Orca decides from your calendar.
- Every reply is listed. Nothing Orca sent while you were away is invisible to you afterwards.
- Needs review is still a thing. Anything it was not confident about waits for you rather than getting an auto-reply.
Last 24 hours
You can always see what it did, and what it cost.
The Last 24h panel is the log. Total triaged, how many were ignored and why (built-in list, your rules, CC-only, unsubscribe traffic), how many needed a decision, how many were scheduling, how many scheduler runs happened, and the errors if there were any.
It also shows tokens and estimated cost. Scheduled work runs under a daily budget cap, and the panel shows input tokens, output tokens and the estimated spend, so the number is there to watch and there to argue with. We would rather you saw it than wondered.
And there is a morning digest, if you want one: a notification with the overnight numbers, so you know what Orca handled before you have opened anything.
How it fits with the rest of Orca
Autopilot makes things. These are the places you see them.
Pricing
Autopilot is in every licence. It is the point of the licence.
£250/licence/month
Every Orca licence includes Autopilot
- Runs on your machine, your mailboxes
- Daily budget cap on scheduled AI work
- Every job can be switched off individually
One licence, the whole assistant
This page is one part of it. Every part below comes with the same licence.
- Orca Inbox
- Orca Autopilot You are here
- Orca Calendar
- Orca Book
- Orca Meet
- Orca Post
- Orca Brief
- Orca Notes
- Orca People
- Orca Chat
- Orca Plan
- Orca Clip
- Orca Mobile
- Orca Today
- Orca Screen recording storage
Claude API usage, setup support and updates are in the monthly price. The pricing page has the one-off setup fee and the rate for six licences or more.
Also available: Orca Time, £2.79 per seat a month, with Orca Snap included.
Questions: chris@simmance.ai.
Questions people ask
Will it reply to someone without me knowing?
No. Everything is a draft until you approve it. The one exception is out-of-office mode, which you switch on deliberately, and every reply it sends is listed in On your return so nothing it said is a surprise.
Does it mark my emails as read?
Never. Autopilot reads for triage and leaves the read state alone. Your Outlook or Gmail shows the same unread count it would have shown without Orca.
What does "ignored" actually mean?
Left alone. The email still arrives in your inbox, unread, in the normal place. Ignored just means Orca does not draft, score or surface it. Hide sender and Hide domain do the same thing for a person or a company, and you can delete the rule later.
How does it know how I write?
From your profile settings, from the thread it is replying into, and, with preference learning switched on, from your edits. When you change a draft and approve it, Orca notes the preference (the sign-off you use, the paragraph you always cut) and applies it next time. You can see and delete what it has learned.
What if I have several mailboxes?
Up to five per install. Autopilot triages each one, and if the same email lands in two of them it is processed once, not twice. Drafts go out from the mailbox the email arrived in.