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Follow-ups that never get forgotten

An Aivell keeps a chase list of unanswered emails and missing client documents, checks the mailbox every morning for replies, and sends a polite, escalating reminder to whoever still owes you something — stopping the instant the answer lands. It runs on schedule, on a box behind your firewall.

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starts when: Every weekday morning, on a schedule

The problem

Every office has a ghost workload: the things other people were supposed to send. The signed mandate, the claim photos, the accountant’s missing statement, the yes-or-no that has been “coming right up” for two weeks. None of it is your work, yet all of it blocks your work — and remembering to re-ask, politely, at decent intervals, is a job in itself.

So it gets done badly. Reminders go out in guilty bursts, some threads get chased twice in a day while others go quiet forever, and the tone drifts with the sender’s mood. It is classic chase-and-check labor — the kind McKinsey estimates makes up roughly 45% of professional-services work that current technology can already carry.

How your Aivell does it

  1. Every morning, replies first. The scheduled run opens with a mailbox sweep. Whatever arrived overnight — an answer, the actual document — closes its chase on the spot and gets marked done on the sheet.
  2. Then the ladder. Items still open advance along your escalation rules: a friendly nudge at three days, firmer wording with a colleague in cc at seven, a human handover with the full history at fourteen. Each reminder replies into the original thread, so context travels with it.
  3. Attachments are verified, not assumed. A reply containing some PDF doesn’t end the chase — only the document you asked for does. Wrong file, and the next reminder says so, nicely.
  4. The pestering has hard limits. Never twice in a day, never on weekends, never past three reminders — and a guardrail confines the Email tool to people already on the thread, so a chase can’t wander to strangers.
  5. You feed it by forwarding. “Chase this” in a forwarded thread is the entire onboarding. The sheet shows every open chase, its age, and every reminder sent.

The result is follow-up that is relentless and even-tempered at the same time — which no busy human manages — while every message it ever sends stays within threads you started, on infrastructure you own.

The chore, as you'd write it.

No flowcharts, no code — a chore is just a message to your Aivell, in your own words. It shapes it into a solid, guarded procedure and follows it to the letter. This one:

Giulia Aivell · chase what is owed ● active

every weekday at 9:00, go through the chase list

first check the mailbox — any reply that arrived closes its chase, mark it done

an attachment only counts if it's the document we actually asked for

three days of silence: send a friendly nudge, referencing the original thread

seven days: firmer wording, and put Ines in cc

fourteen days: stop chasing, hand the case to Ines with the full history

never chase twice in one day, never on weekends, never more than three reminders

new items join the list when I forward a thread with the words "chase this"

You
Got it — I'll start right away, and check with you whenever something needs a human.
Giulia Aivell

The tools it uses.

Connected with single-click passkeys — no copied tokens, no OAuth hell.

Schedule runs the chase round every morning
Email checks for replies, sends the reminders
Spreadsheets keeps the chase list and its history

Sensible guardrails.

Every tool can be limited to exactly what this chore needs. For this one, you might set:

Email Reminders may go only to recipients already on the original thread. Writing to any new address requires approval first.
Spreadsheets Can update status and dates on the chase sheet. Deleting rows or clearing history is blocked.

Questions, answered.

Will it nag a client who already answered? +

No — checking comes before chasing. Every morning run starts by scanning the mailbox; a reply or the awaited document closes that chase before any reminder is drafted. The embarrassing "ignore my previous email" moment is precisely what this chore exists to prevent.

Can I decide how pushy it gets? +

Entirely. The escalation ladder is written in plain language — friendly at three days, firmer at seven, hand over at fourteen — and you can reword any rung, change the timing, or cap the number of reminders. It follows your ladder, not a built-in one.

Our chases involve client files and policy documents. Do they leave the office? +

No. The mailbox is read and the reminders are written on the box, inside your network. Client correspondence and whatever documents arrive are never uploaded to a cloud AI — a hard requirement when the attachments are policies and claims.

How does something get on the chase list? +

The low-tech way — forward the thread and write "chase this". Your Aivell files it with the date and what's owed. Other chores can add items too, so a request for documents can start its own chase automatically.

Related.

What is an Aivell?

An Aivell is an on-premise AI colleague: a small box that plugs into your network, runs its own AI onboard and takes the repetitive work off your desk. Prompts, documents, data — nothing ever leaves your office. Unplug the internet: it keeps working.

You describe each task as a chore, in plain language. Your Aivell turns it into a solid, guarded procedure and runs it in the background — with guardrails on every tool, a complete audit trail, and approvals in your hand when you want them. One-time setup, fixed monthly fee. No tokens, no overages.

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onboard inference · air-gapped · fixed monthly fee