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Let’s be honest: email kinda sucks. It’s not just the writing: it’s also the reading, the sorting, the figuring out what the third reply in a 15-message chain is supposed to mean.
The good news is that artificial intelligence is now genuinely helpful when it comes to the soul-crushing drudgery of email. Free up the hours you spend every week typing, reading, and agonising with these practical, AI-infused ways to tame your email.
We’ve all been copied on the 27-reply thread with the subject line, “RE: FW: Re: Quick question.” Reading it is an act of sheer madness. Don’t.
Use an AI assistant built into your email client—such as Gemini in Gmail, Copilot in Outlook, or features in services like Superhuman and Shortwave—to generate a one-paragraph summary of the entire conversation.
You’ll get the action items, the key decisions, and the final context in seconds.
You know what you need to say, but forming the polite, professional, and correct sentences takes energy you don’t have.
Use your email service’s built-in AI reply generator. With one click, your AI can draft a response, often 90% perfect, and all you’ll have to do is polish and send.
Here’s how to do it with Gmail and Outlook.
Your inbox treats all emails equally, which means the notification for a company-wide memo announcing leftover Panera in the break room hits just as hard as the one from your biggest client.
Employ smart filtering tools, such as SaneBox or Shortwave, that use machine learning to sort mail into custom folders like “Urgent/Action,” “Later/Digest,” and “Newsletters/Reading.”
This frees your primary inbox for only the messages that require immediate action from a real human.
Ever written a draft when you’re annoyed, only to read it back and realise you sound like an unemployable crank? Thankfully, AI can be your sanity check and personal PR manager.
Most generative AI tools include a tone adjuster. Draft your email quickly, then use a prompt to change the tone to “professional,” “friendly,” or “assertive but brief.”
The AI restructures the language to hit the right emotional note, preventing misunderstandings and eliminating the “draft-read-delete-rewrite-overthink” cycle.
The sales process, the project check-in, the reminder to your colleague: follow-up is a mundane yet recurring element of work.
Use an AI tool such as Mixmax or follow-up features in your company’s CRM to automatically schedule a “nudge” email to send if the recipient hasn’t responded after a set number of days.
Better yet, some tools use AI to suggest the optimal time to send based on past recipient behaviour, resulting in far less manual tracking of open loops.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doug Aamoth is a former writer and editor at TechCrunch and Time magazine, and has written for Fast Company, PCWorld, Money magazine, and other publications. With more than 20 years in consumer electronics, tech media, digital video, and software, his goal is to make technology approachable and useful for everyone, helping readers stay informed, productive, and secure in the digital age.