Inbox AI

Inbox AI adds a unified, searchable Contact Form 7 (CF7) inbox on top of your existing forms — without modifying Contact Form 7 itself. Every submission is stored, analyzed by your chosen AI provider, and turned into something your team can actually work from: a plain-language AI email summary, a suggested category and priority, a confidence score, and a ready-to-edit draft reply.

If you’ve ever dug through email notifications trying to figure out which contact form submissions actually need a reply, Inbox AI is built for exactly that problem. Think of it as a Contact Form 7 AI layer: a lightweight support inbox, contact form management tool, and lead management layer that turns what your forms already collect into a focused, triage-ready queue.

How it works

1. A visitor submits one of your monitored Contact Form 7 forms.
2. Inbox AI stores the submission locally in your WordPress database.
3. Your connected AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini) analyzes it in the background and returns a summary, category, priority, confidence score, and a suggested reply.
4. You review everything in the AI Inbox screen and, when you’re happy with it, send the reply yourself. Nothing is ever sent to a visitor automatically.

Who it’s for

• Small businesses and agencies using Contact Form 7 who want a real support inbox instead of scattered email notifications.
• Support and sales teams that want an AI customer support layer for day-to-day customer inquiry management, triaging contact form submissions by priority and category automatically.
• Anyone already using Flamingo to store Contact Form 7 submissions who wants AI categorization and an AI-drafted reply on top of that same data.

AI Features

• AI-generated summary for every submission, so you don’t have to read the full message to know what it’s about.
• AI prioritization and category suggestions (Urgent, High, Normal, Low), with a confidence score for each AI analysis.
• AI-drafted reply you can edit before sending — an AI email assistant for drafting replies, not an autoresponder.
• Bring your own API key: OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), or Google Gemini. You choose the provider and control the cost.
• Automatic retry for any submission whose AI analysis failed, with a clear failure state instead of a silent gap.

Inbox & Submission Management

• A searchable, filterable AI inbox: filter by form, status, priority, category, AI confidence, and date range.
• Full-text search across sender name, email, subject, and message.
• A per-submission detail screen with the full AI analysis and an activity timeline (who did what, and when) — closer to a support ticket assistant than a plain message list.
• CSV export of the current filtered view, for reporting or import into another contact form database or CRM.
• Manual “Mark reviewed,” “Archive,” and “Delete” actions, each gated behind its own WordPress capability.

Not just a Contact Form 7 database plugin

Inbox AI stores every submission to a monitored Contact Form 7 form directly in your own WordPress database, the same way a dedicated Contact Form 7 database plugin would — and lets you search, filter, and export those contact form entries to CSV without running anything else alongside it. Where it goes further is the AI layer on top of that stored data: a plain-language summary, a suggested category and priority, and a draft reply for every submission, so you’re not just archiving messages, you’re actually working through them.

It isn’t a full replacement for a dedicated database add-on, though. Inbox AI doesn’t currently offer multisite-wide storage, capture or store form attachments, support generic CSV import with custom field mapping, or let you rename field labels — if your site depends on any of those specific features, a dedicated Contact Form 7 database plugin running alongside Inbox AI still makes sense.

Contacts

• Every sender automatically grouped into a single Contacts row — a lightweight contact form CRM view built directly from your existing submissions, no separate import needed.
• Search plus category and priority filters, matching the main inbox.
• One click from a contact straight to every message from that sender.
• CSV export and an archive-based delete, so removing a contact never destroys the underlying message history.

Notifications

• Email and Slack notifications so your team knows when a new submission — or one flagged urgent by the AI — needs attention, keeping AI customer service response times fast.

Import & Migration

• A guided import wizard for existing Flamingo submissions, so switching from Flamingo to Inbox AI doesn’t mean losing your submission history.
• A CSV upload path for a Flamingo export, for sites that can’t run the direct import wizard.

Privacy & Security

• Your AI provider API key is encrypted in the database and only ever shown masked (e.g. sk-••••••7f2A) after saving.
• Custom WordPress capabilities control who can view, edit, reply to, delete, or export messages — no blanket admin-only access.
• No data reaches any AI provider until you’ve connected one and explicitly turned on at least one monitored form.

Performance

• AI analysis runs as a background AI workflow via WP-Cron — a visitor’s form submission is never delayed waiting on an AI response.

Developer Friendly

• Built to WordPress coding standards, with its own custom capabilities (filterable via inboxai_capabilities) instead of overloading core roles.
• Integrates with Contact Form 7 (wpcf7) exclusively through its own public hooks — wpcf7_before_send_mail, wpcf7_mail_sent, and wpcf7_mail_failed for capturing submissions, plus wpcf7_admin_misc_pub_section/wpcf7_after_save for per-form AI categories — so Contact Form 7 core files and its own outgoing mail are never touched.
• Lifecycle action hooks (e.g. inboxai_loaded) for developers who want to extend the plugin.

External services

This plugin connects to a third-party AI provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini, whichever one the site administrator chooses and configures with their own API key in Settings → AI Provider — so it can generate a summary, suggested category, priority, and a suggested reply for each Contact Form 7 submission the administrator chooses to analyze.

What data is sent, and when: each time a monitored form is submitted (or an administrator clicks “Retry”/”Regenerate”), the submission’s text content (message body, subject, and the customer’s name, to the extent the administrator’s own prompt template references them) is sent to the selected provider’s API, along with the site’s configured prompt instructions. No data is sent to any provider until an AI provider is connected and at least one form is turned on under Monitored Forms. The administrator’s API key is sent with each request (as required by the provider’s own API) and is otherwise stored only on the site, encrypted, and never transmitted anywhere else.

Only one provider is contacted per request — whichever one is currently selected in Settings → AI Provider. The plugin never uses a shared or proxy key; the site owner must supply and pay for their own API key directly with the provider.

• OpenAI — used when you select OpenAI as your provider. Terms of Use, Privacy Policy.
• Anthropic — used when you select Anthropic as your provider. Commercial Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.
• Google Gemini — used when you select Google Gemini as your provider. Gemini API Additional Terms of Service, Google Privacy Policy.

Source Code

This plugin’s distributed assets (build/admin/admin.js, build/admin/admin.css, build/cf7/category.js, and related compiled/minified files) are built from human-readable source via npm run build (webpack, through @wordpress/scripts).

The uncompiled source — the src/ directory, along with package.json, webpack.config.js, and build configuration — is publicly available at:

https://github.com/theaminulai/inbox-ai

That repository is the canonical, always-up-to-date source for every compiled file shipped in this plugin.