Overview

When you send marketing emails, replies come back. Lots of them. Unsubscribes, out-of-office messages, people who’ve changed jobs, bounce notifications, genuine sales inquiries — and a mountain of spam. Sorting through all of this manually is tedious and error-prone. Mary’s Email Reply Management handles this automatically. Every reply that arrives in your configured inbox is read and classified by Mary’s AI. Based on the category it falls into, Mary can extract key pieces of information from the email and then trigger downstream actions — like updating a Marketo record, adding someone to a static list, or creating a new contact. The whole system is built around three building blocks you configure yourself: Categories, Data Extraction, and Actions.

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The Flow: How an Email Gets Processed

When a reply hits your inbox, here’s exactly what happens:

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Categories & Actions

The Categories & Actions page is where you define the rules Mary follows. Think of it as training Mary on what to look for and what to do about it.

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Categories

A category is a bucket that a reply can fall into. You give it a name and write a plain-English prompt that tells Mary how to recognize it. Mary uses your prompt to decide whether an incoming email belongs in that bucket. Default categories (which you can customize or delete):

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Writing a good category prompt

The prompt is the most important part of each category. Mary reads it literally, so the more specific and clear you are, the more accurately she’ll classify. Here are real examples from the product:

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Extract Data

For some categories, it’s not enough to simply classify the email — you need to pull specific information out of it. That’s what the Extract Data step is for. You define named fields and describe what each one contains. Mary then reads the email and populates those fields with whatever she finds. If a field isn’t present in the email and you haven’t marked it as required, Mary will simply leave it blank. Example — Left Company: Example — Out-Of-Office: Once extracted, these field values become available as variables you can use in your Actions — for example, to create a new Marketo lead using the extracted newContactEmail.

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Actions

Actions are what Mary does after classifying and extracting data from an email. They run automatically the moment a match is confirmed. Available action types include:

• Sync Lead to Marketo — Update one or more fields on a Marketo lead record. You can set static values (e.g., unsubscribed = true) or use dynamic variables from Mary’s classification (e.g., unsubscribedReason = [allGood] {{ classification }}: {{ rationale }}).
• Add to Marketo Static List — Add the sender’s email address to a specific Marketo static list. The list is identified by ID, and allGood will display the list name for confirmation.

Example — Unsubscribe category actions:

1. Sync Lead to Marketo
   • unsubscribed → true
   • unsubscribedReason → [allGood] {{ classification }}: {{ rationale }}
2. Add to Marketo Static List
   • Email Address: {{ from.address }}
   • List: Unsubscribed by Mary (ID: 19044)

You can stack multiple actions per category and reorder them using the up/down arrows. Click + Add Action to add more.

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Messages

The Messages page gives you a live view of every email Mary has processed. Processed emails are displayed as cards showing:

• The email subject line
• The sender’s name and email address
• The category Mary assigned to it (e.g., → Human Request)

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Filtering by category

Use the tab bar at the top to filter the view by category. Click Unsubscribe to see only unsubscribe replies, Bounce for bounces, and so on. Recents shows the most recently processed emails regardless of category.

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Inspecting an individual email

Click any message card to open a detailed view. This shows you:

• The full email body
• The classification Mary assigned and exactly why she made that call — Mary explains her reasoning in plain English

You can expand each of the following sections to see exactly what happened during processing:

• Classify Email — Mary’s reasoning for the category she chose
• Extract Fields — The values Mary pulled from the email body
• Fetch Data — Any data retrieved from external systems (e.g., Marketo) before extraction
• Execute Actions — Which actions ran and their outcomes
• Original Email — The raw email as it arrived

If you notice an email was classified incorrectly, you can click Re-run to reprocess it after making changes to your category configuration.

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Search

The Search page lets you find specific emails across all processed messages. It’s especially useful for debugging — for instance, if you want to confirm that a specific contact’s reply was picked up and classified correctly. You can search across all fields at once, or narrow your search to a specific field using the dropdown: Results appear as cards just like the Messages page, and you can click into any result to view the full processing detail.

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Settings

The Settings page lets you configure top-level details about your Email Reply Management setup. Configuration Name — Give your reply management setup a descriptive name (e.g., “Motive Email Categorization”). This name appears in the sidebar and helps identify the configuration if you have multiple Reply Management setups.