Five AI email writers

When it comes to AI email writers you are now spoiled for choice. Below we summarize five popular AI email writers.

Mailmeteor

Mailmeteor is an AI email writing tool primarily focused on businesses but it also has a free plan and starter plan for individuals. Mailmeteor can be used directly in Gmail and Outlook, and it allows you to easily send personalized mass emails. Mailmeteor comes with an AI email writer, GPT, that’s available in the free plans.

AI MailMaestro

MailMaestro is an AI email assistant built for individuals and teams that integrates into Outlook Mail and Gmail to help you write your emails. It has a free plan that allows you to test out its different AI tools, and it has different paid plans best suited for your needs. MailMaestro claims to use the best LLMs (GPT4O and Claude 3.5), and with its free AI tool you can write and answer emails, as well as improve the email’s design. The paid plans offer a wider range of AI tools such as summarizing emails, and AI priority inboxes.

AI Mail Assistant (ChatGPT for Gmail)

AI Mail Assistant is ChatGPT’s add-on for Gmail. This AI writing assistant also uses GPT-4o and comes with features like email summarizer, email translation, answer emails, and a feature to improve your drafts which gives you tips and suggestions on how to polish the tone and style of your drafted email. This Gmail add-on allows you to directly ask ChatGPT questions without the need for an OpenAI account. AI Mail Assistant for Gmail is available for a free trial period or through a paid plan.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft’s Copilot offers a Copilot writing assistant in Microsoft 365 for personal use. This extensive AI tool works in popular Microsoft-owned tools like Word and Excel and in your Outlook mailbox. In Outlook Mail, the Microsoft Copilot can recap long email threads into quick summaries, create and write emails for you, and offer writing tips and suggestions before you send emails. Microsoft Copilot has a free version with limited features and a paid for Pro plan which offers more extensive AI features.

Gemini in Gmail

Google’s Gemini is available to use for free in Gmail and offers AI features such as summarizing email threads, and suggesting responses to emails. The AI email writer assistant can also create email drafts and events in Google Calendar, and find information from past emails, calendar events, or files in Google Drive.

While you may already be using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to find the answers to your questions fast, if you use an email provider owned by Big Tech like Gmail or Outlook you may have noticed that AI email writers are becoming increasingly advertised for you to use while composing emails. This is because the race to develop the most advanced AI is on, and many companies are scrambling to create the best AI tools available. But in order to train these AI models vast amounts of data are needed - more specifically, yours. Allowing AI into your private mailbox might seem attractive and useful to boost productivity, but we’d highly encourage you not to opt in. Read on to find out why!

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Why is Big Tech’s AI not trustworthy?

Your mailbox is your personal vault that collects and stores confidential and private communications, documents, and information usually over a long period of time. Forgot about that letter from your lawyer or doctor? Well, it’s most likely sitting in your email. When you let AI email assistants or writers into your mailbox, they have complete access to all your emails and any documents, images, or private information that you’ve stored over the years. Now imagine this, your mailbox has an AI bot that yes, does help you write emails quicker and maybe keeps your mailbox more organized, but this AI tool is also doing a lot with your email data behind the scenes – like scanning, analyzing, and collecting it and using it to train its LLMs. What the AI does quietly in the background threatens your email privacy and tech giants do not want you to know about this.

If you’re wondering why the companies behind these AI models do not want you to be fully informed, it’s because when you use AI they make huge profits off of your data – from collecting it, selling it to advertisers and third parties, to using it to improve their own LLMs. These are a few reasons why people are often not explicitly informed about the privacy policy and terms of use when consenting to use AI.

Why is AI bad for emails

Allowing an AI email writer into your mailbox might seem like the perfect way to boost your productivity, but it comes with many risks.

1. How does AI affect privacy?

While an AI email writer may seem like the perfect tool to help you be more productive and get things done faster, it usually comes with Terms&Conditions that are often not very clear. Because of the nature of the information collected in your mailbox, it should be kept private and only be accessible to you, but your email privacy is lost when AI has access to it. Each time you opt-in and allow an AI writing tool into your mailbox, you consent to give external parties access to your mailbox, too – not just the AI tool. This should worry you because your mailbox contains a lot of sensitive data that should not be analyzed, scanned, and collected at all. Another concern is that AI tools often have vast networks of data-sharing agreements, so your data could also be shared with others – something over which you have zero control.

2. AI tools collect vast amounts of data

AI is only able to give useful suggestions and answers through extensive training from human data. And the more data the LLM is trained on, the better. Now, every time we go on social media platforms our data is collected for AI purposes, often without us knowing. And the same happens when we use email AI writers – but now they collect the data from your emails and interactions with the AI tool.

The types of data the AI collects are dependent on the tool you use. In general, these tools often collect the questions you ask and conversations you have with the AI bot as well as data related to your location information, device type, and language. Because of the extensive data collection and review of some data by humans, IT experts often recommend not to share any personal information with AI bots. Yet, how should you do this once you’ve allowed the AI writing assistant access to your most private emails?

3. Your data is used in many ways

When you use an AI email writer how your data is used and who it is shared with is dependent on the provider. Below we explore some of the most common ways AI uses your data.

• They collect your data to train Large Language Models (LLM). The more data sets they can get the better and more intelligent the AI model becomes.

• They use your data to learn about your behaviors, from that they can then better predict your behavioral patterns.

• Your data and behavioral patterns are used for advertising. The data they collect is invaluable for advertisers who target you with personalized ads.

How they use your data: the worst case scenario Because these LLMs have such a reach into everything you do, from what you share on your social platforms, what you like and engage with, to your emails, they hold a lot of power. If the data these AI tools collect is used unethically like through creating biased algorithms, they can use AI tools and your data in ways to persuade you, change your opinions, and even brainwash you.

While this is the worst-case scenario, events like this have taken place in the past, just look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

4. Using AI harms the environment

Another reason not to use AI not only in your mailbox but at all is due to the negative environmental effect of running these LLMs. AI is able to produce answers and pull information in just seconds, but what we don’t see are the huge data centers that hold the AI servers. As consumers we are not educated about AI’s environmental footprint, but to make it short: it’s bad.

But why is AI bad for the environment?

• The data centers where AI computations are executed need huge amounts of electricity.

• The data centers that house the AI servers use large amounts of water.

• The microchips that power AI use rare elements that are commonly mined unsustainably.

• The data centers also produce electronic waste, often containing mercury and lead.

5. AI is not open source

All of the reviewed AI bots – Mailmeteor, AI MailMaestro, AI Mail Assistant, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini – are not open source. Thus, it is impossible to know what is going on under the hood. What data do these tools use, how do they use them, and who do they share them with? It is all a big black box. While many AI models say they do not collect personal or identifiable data, can we truly trust an AI bot not to scrape our personal data? Especially considering that the more data AI models are trained on the better?

Currently there’s no set definition of what open source AI is, but there have been some efforts, like the white paper by the Open Source Initiative. With that being said, if an AI was truly open source, it would mean that the code and data sets are publicly available for review. In most cases, companies that claim their AI to be open source do not make their data sets publicly available.

Opt out of AI

For people who have a Google account and are 18 or older, Gemini is on by default. Screenshot taken from Google.

In 2024, a Gmail user took to Reddit to share the invasive conversation they had with Gemini. During the conversation with the AI tool, it became clear that the LLM was scraping data from the user’s emails to produce replies – even though the user had never granted the LLM access.

This shocking case of Google’s Gemini using email data without the user giving explicit consent highlights another problematic AI trend. AI operators are opting people into having their data used for AI by default, without asking the users for explicit consent. This goes for all online platforms using AI. For example, if you use any Meta products or if you are present on Linkedin, you have most likely been opted in by default so that the respective AI bot can use your data for training purposes without your knowledge.

Bots will not fix the email problem

AI bots are designed to speed up your email workflow – but in fact, they will have the opposite effect: First, they will increase the email flood and spam because spammers can create and send their annoying messages faster and to more people. Second, people themselves will start talking to AI bots, instead of talking to each other: More and more emails you receive will contain fluffy AI written intros and outros that no one needs to read. That’s why you will start using AI to summarize the fluffy AI-composed texts to get the gist of it. So, no AI will make emails not better, just worse. In the end, AI will not improve your email workflow, just make it more tedious. Instead, we should learn how to write professional emails - concise and to the point. This saves time for all of us, the one who writes the email and the one who receives it, without needing any AI writing assistant.

There are still email providers that don’t use AI

Because Big Tech email is implementing AI into your mailbox and sneakily opting you in, we would recommend you take back your email privacy and get a new mailbox with Tuta Mail. Tuta is a green email provider that’s privacy-focused, does not use AI, and doesn’t serve you personalized ads.

Guaranteed email privacy when you choose Tuta Mail

Tuta Mail is an end-to-end encrypted email and calendar provider based in Germany. Tuta guarantees email privacy and the best-in-class security for your mailbox with its quantum-proof encryption and open source code.

Built on the principles of data minimization and private by design, Tuta Mail does not track you, profile you, or serve you ads and offers both free and paid plans. Tuta also does not offer or support the use of AI email writers and external AI add-ons because as a privacy-focused email provider, this would compromise your mailbox’s privacy.

When you choose Tuta Mail, you choose to protect your private data. Join the privacy revolution!