Email Triage Taxonomies for LLM Classification

Short summary

Email classification succeeds on taxonomy design, not model choice. The author advocates four categories mapping to specific actions (URGENT, ACTION, FYI, NOISE), concrete examples over abstract definitions, and deterministic prompting at minimal cost (~$0.002 per 100 emails with GPT-4o-mini). Good taxonomies become decision trees, shape control flow, enable safe idempotent agents, and teach principles applicable to sales, support, and other domains.

• •Taxonomy design is more important than model choice for email classification
• •Four-category system (URGENT/ACTION/FYI/NOISE) maps to specific workflows and behaviors
• •Deterministic prompting (temperature=0) achieves >90% accuracy at <$0.002 per 100 emails

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.