Email Intake & Triage CRM

An inbound enquiry handling system. Someone emails a dedicated address; the system researches their company, writes a structured record, checks whether they've emailed before, assigns a priority with reasoning, and surfaces it on a login-gated dashboard where records can be updated by chatting in plain language.

Live: https://email-intake-crm.vercel.app Intake address: [email protected]

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind) on Vercel
• Supabase — Postgres, Row Level Security, Auth
• Claude (Anthropic API) — company research, priority classification, record-update chat
• Mailgun — inbound email routing

Pipeline

email -> Mailgun MX -> route: forward()
      -> POST /api/inbound/mailgun  (verify HMAC signature, insert row, return 200)
      -> Supabase enquiries table
      -> [enrichment + classification, separate path]
      -> dashboard

The webhook stays thin on purpose. Mailgun retries any non-2xx response for hours, and two Claude calls would blow past its timeout — so the handler verifies, inserts, and returns 200. Enrichment happens off the request path.

Project status

Current state, what is outstanding, costs, and configuration live in STATUS.md.

Eight of the nine build-order steps are complete and deployed; the chat-based record update interface is the remaining item.

Debugging log

Every problem hit during this build — with the actual error text, the real cause, and the fix — is documented in TROUBLESHOOTING.md.

It covers seven issues, including two application bugs that failed completely silently, a DNS misconfiguration that made inbound mail impossible, and two occasions where work still in flight was wrongly declared dead. The closing section draws out what the failures had in common.

Known limitations

• Supabase free-tier projects pause after inactivity. A paused project means the webhook's insert fails and Mailgun retries. A keep-alive is planned.
• The webhook is a public endpoint that triggers paid Claude calls. HMAC signature verification means only Mailgun can invoke it, and a hard daily cap (ENRICHMENT_DAILY_CAP, currently 25) bounds the spend. The cap is claimed with a single atomic Postgres statement and fails closed. Measured cost is roughly $0.15-0.25 per enriched enquiry at medium effort; a full-effort run measured $0.54, almost entirely from web search results being fed back into context.
• Email confirmation is enabled and uses Supabase's built-in email service. Delivery works but is slow (measured: ~3 minutes) and the free tier allows only a few messages per hour, so repeated sign-up testing will hit the limit. Custom SMTP via Mailgun is the proper fix and remains outstanding.
• Priority quality depends on src/lib/business-context.ts. That file describes what a valuable enquiry looks like for this specific business. It is the difference between real triage and a keyword rule, and it should be edited to match reality.
• Every push to main deploys to production. The GitHub repo is connected to the Vercel project, so a broken commit goes live. npm run build passing locally is the gate before each commit.

Local development

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then fill in every value
npm run dev

Database migrations live in supabase/migrations/ and are applied with:

supabase db push --db-url "postgresql://postgres.<ref>:<password>@aws-0-<region>.pooler.supabase.com:5432/postgres"