What Makes a Great AI Email Assistant?
All busy sales and marketing professionals know that managing emails can be one of the most beneficial, but also time-consuming, parts of any given day. However, if you automate email tasks and use AI for writing emails, you can easily save time and maximize efficiency.
Email artificial intelligence offers many benefits. The right tool can write replies, personalize template messages, improve collaboration between team members, and more. However, with dozens of AI email apps out there, it’s hard to know what makes the best AI email writer tools.
When comparing AI email assistant apps, we looked for solutions that offered the following:
- Unique features that stand out from the competition
- Compatibility with a variety of mail providers and operating systems
- Integration with other applications and business tools
We then tested over a dozen apps and developed this list of the best AI email assistant tools, each one a unique solution for an issue sales and marketing teams often face.
4 Best AI Email Assistant Tools for an Efficient Inbox
- Canary Mail: Best for Secure, Encrypted Email Communication
- Flowrite: Best for Automating Day-to-Day Communications
- Smartwriter: Best for Personalizing Cold Emails
- Missive: Best for Collaboration and Teams
1. Canary Mail : Best for Secure, Encrypted Email Communication
Price: Free plan with limited features. Premium starts at $20 per user per year
Compatible With: Any other IMAP-based email service such as Gmail, Yahoo, Office 365, iCloud, and FastMail, it has universal IMAP support.
Canary Mail's AI Copilot launches top-notch add-ons that upgrade the email system. It works like a custom aide, stretching beyond just automation. It assists users in crafting emails, responding to active dialogue, and even setting the preferred mood for their responses. The AI-powered summarization tool quickly shrinks extended email sequences, offering summaries that save users some precious time.
The engaging style of the AI Copilot chat in Canary Mail lets users connect with their assistant for snippets into their mailbox, calendars, unfinished chores, and more. This chat mode ensures fast reach to relevant details without exploring multiple folders or accounts. Moreover, Copilot Chat makes managing mailbox actions easier, simplifying tasks like moving, deleting, archiving emails, and adding accounts.
Besides the main tasks, the Copilot Chat within Canary Mail is a solid built-in support tool that provides tips and solves issues. Users can ask for explanation on functionalities or solve technical problems without leaving the app, improving the overall user journey.
The combo of AI and email organization, shown in Canary Mail's AI Copilot, symbolizes a significant change. It boosts emails from letters to helpful tools for increasing work efficiency. As tech gets better, these new ideas suggest a more direct, easy-to-understand, and improved way to handle digital messages. This paves the way for a future where AI changes our email handling and overall digital communication.
- End-to-End Encryption
- User-Friendly Interface
- Regular Updates and Support
- Limited third-party integration
2. Flowrite: Best for Automating Day-to-Day Communications
Price: Starting at $4.50/month, after 14-day free trial
Compatible With: Over 20 popular mail providers (including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and iCloud Mail) through a Chrome extension.
Even if you know how to write an email professionally, it can still be time-consuming to write dozens of messages each day. That’s where Flowrite comes in handy: it automates the entire composition process. Flowrite is an AI-powered email assistant available as a simple Chrome extension. Once you install the extension, you can go to your inbox and use the tool to generate an AI response.
What sets Flowrite apart from other email AI assistant options is the fact that it generates an entire message based on both the context of the previous message and the few bullet points you specify. This gives you both context and control without requiring time or brainpower. Or, if you don’t even have that much to go off, you can select from the available AI templates to write a response.
Another impressive upside of this email AI assistant is the fact that it doesn’t just provide one, but three different AI generated emails to choose from as a response. You can then either copy and paste the response or ask Flowrite to make additional adjustments in length or tone by using the Iterate function.
Flowrite offers a 14-day free trial, but after that users must choose from one of three pricing tiers for individuals or a team plan. You can choose from either monthly or annual billing, and plans start at $4.50 per month, making it a fairly cheap AI email assistant. The app is compatible with 20 different mail providers and social media platforms, meaning you can generate both emails and social media messages.
- Seemless integration with most major mail providers
- Generates emails based on context and your input
- Provides multiple AI-generated responses for each message
- No free version available
- Users must set up each account separately
- Requires some copy + paste on your part
3. Smartwriter: Best for Personalizing Cold Emails
Price: Starting at $59/month, after free trial
Compatible With: Apollo, Google Sheets, Hubspot, Lemlist, Mailshake, Reply, Shopify, Smartlead, Snov.io, Woodpecker.
Many sales and marketing professionals use email templates to manage the cold email and lead generation process. However, templates can come across as cold, insincere, and robotic. That’s the last thing you want when trying to gain new clients, but manually writing cold pitches and marketing mail is too much, so many marketing and sales teams are turning to Smartwriter.
Smartwriter is meant to help users create AI generated email openers at scale by using data pulled from a person’s LinkedIn, website, or Google reviews. For marketing professionals who feel like their current cold emails and marketing blasts aren’t personal enough, this is the best AI email assistant for you. No other product we tested compares in terms of the data it collects from LinkedIn or other links, and the text intros it generates with this information are truly personalized and engaging.
However, the significant advantage here over other email AI tools is the fact that it pulls all of the data for you based on the URL you provide. In other words, you don’t have to copy and paste anything or manually enter anything — you just need a CSV or Google Sheets file with the profile or website links for the people you wish to contact. Then, you can just download the results in a CSV or Google Sheets file and import it into your campaign management software to streamline the process. Unfortunately, this means Smartwriter doesn’t integrate with mail clients, just close to a dozen CMS programs.
Smartwriter offers a 7-day free trial, which includes 15 “credits.” After that, you can choose from one of three paid subscription tiers that run between $59 and $359 per month.
- Provides fully personalized email openers with minimal input
- Supports uploading CSV and Google Sheets files
- Allows users to integrate with several mass email tools
- Doesn’t write entire emails, just icebreakers and PS lines
- No integrations with some popular email marketing apps like Mailchimp
4. Missive: Best for Collaboration and Teams
Price: Free (limited features), or paid tiers starting at $14/month
Compatible With: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS.
Email artificial intelligence can take many forms. Although most cheap AI email assistant programs are designed for individual use, Missive isn’t. It’s a tool that offers AI email assistant benefits in terms of workflow automation and collaboration between team members.
Our trial proved that Missive provides many advantages, including automation rules, the ability to auto-assign messages, canned responses, and more. All of these email AI automation options can help teams save time and energy when dealing with emails related to sales or customer service. Missive also supports integrations with many other business apps like task management tools so you can automate task creation too.
Although AI email composition isn’t a native part of the Missive app, it now supports connectivity with OpenAI (ChatGPT). With this integration, you can use prompts to generate AI powered email responses, make edits to messages you write, change the tone, and much more. You do have to create an OpenAI account and generate an API key to connect the two accounts before you can use it. Unfortunately, the downside to this is that you must pay for both Missive and OpenAI, which could quickly add up.
Missive is one of the few free AI email assistant options out there, but the free version does come with limited features. Otherwise, paid subscriptions start at $14/month per user. Also, Missive works with most major mail providers through the Missive app, which is available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.
- Supports numerous workflow automations
- Integrates with many other common business apps
- Supports chat and unified inboxes
- Requires OpenAI subscription to use AI email composition
- Must download the Missive desktop or mobile app to use
Clean Email: Comprehensive Solution for a Tidy Inbox
Email artificial intelligence can help you do many things. However, if your AI generated emails start resulting in increased replies, you’re going to need a solution that also helps you keep your inbox organized and tidy. That’s where Clean Email comes in — it gives you over a dozen features all designed to clean up your mail.
Clean Email isn’t an AI email assistant, nor does it help with writing or formatting messages. However, this app is ideal for mailbox management. When combined with the AI email tools mentioned above, you can enjoy a perfectly tidy inbox and save hours of time on email.
With this mailbox management app, you can use the Auto Clean feature to set up automation rules so you don’t have to waste time sorting messages manually. You can program many rules, including ones to move messages into a certain folder as soon as they land in your inbox, mute messages from specific senders, transfer emails from designated senders to trash, add a star to certain messages, and more.
Another key Clean Email feature, called Cleaning Suggestions, essentially is an email AI assistant that provides intuitive mailbox cleanup recommendations based on your email activity, the sender's reputation, and actions taken by other users of the app. You can review these recommended Cleaning Suggestions at any time in the app and choose whether you want Clean Email to perform the suggestions or ignore them. It’s a great AI powered email cleanup method that can save you lots of time.
Finally, Clean Email’s Unsubscriber feature helps remove newsletters and other mass mailings you don’t want from your inbox. In other words, it’s like AI for email junk mail, and you can unsubscribe from all messages from a specific domain in just a few clicks.
These and other features make Clean Email an ideal addition to any AI-powered email assistant so you can best optimize your inbox.
Wrap-up
AI email management is an excellent way to maximize efficiency and productivity in the workplace. An AI email writing assistant can help make it easier to reply to day-to-day communications, improve marketing mailings, and more. Each of the apps suggested above provides solutions for common issues along with strong AI tools. With these tools at your disposal, the AI email assistant benefits are endless. The only question left is, which AI assistant will best meet your needs.
