Setting up an AI email assistant takes about ten minutes and five steps: connect your inbox, let it learn your tone, add an optional knowledge base, review your first drafts, and adjust your labels. This guide walks through each one for both Gmail and Outlook, and shows exactly what you're granting access to — and how to take it back — so you can connect a real inbox with confidence. One rule holds throughout: the assistant only ever prepares drafts, and nothing leaves your outbox until you approve it.
- Connect your Gmail or Outlook inbox via OAuth
- Let the assistant learn your tone from your sent mail
- Add an optional knowledge base for factually grounded replies
- Review and approve your first drafts
- Adjust the labels it applies to match how you triage
What you need before you start
There's no software to install and no plugin to add to your mail app. DraftKite runs as a connected service that sits on top of your existing inbox, so you keep using Gmail or Outlook exactly as you do today while the assistant works in the background. To get started you need:
- A Gmail or Google Workspace inbox, or an Outlook or Microsoft 365 inbox
- The ability to sign in to that account yourself
- About ten minutes — most of the setup runs automatically after you connect
Step 1: Connect Gmail or Outlook
Start by connecting your inbox through your provider's own sign-in screen. Choose Gmail or Outlook and you'll be sent to Google's or Microsoft's OAuth consent page — the same secure hand-off that calendar apps and CRM tools use. You sign in with your provider directly, review the permissions, and approve. DraftKite never sees your password; the provider issues a scoped token that covers only the specific actions listed below.
| What DraftKite can do | What it cannot do |
|---|---|
| Read incoming mail to classify and label it | Send email on your behalf — ever |
| Read a sample of sent mail to learn your tone | Read your full mail history uninvited |
| Save drafted replies to your drafts folder | Delete, move, or edit your existing mail |
| Apply a Gmail label or Outlook category | Change your password or account settings |
That table is the whole picture. The assistant can read and label incoming mail, read a sample of sent mail to learn your voice, and write drafts — but it cannot send, delete, or change your account. You can revoke the connection at any moment, either from inside DraftKite or directly from your Google or Microsoft account's security settings, and access stops immediately.
Step 2: Let it learn your tone
Once connected, the assistant reads a sample of your recently sent emails to pick up how you actually write — your greetings, sentence length, level of formality, and usual sign-off. This is what stops the drafts sounding like a generic chatbot and makes them read like something you'd send yourself. You don't configure anything for this: it happens automatically after you connect, and it keeps refining as you edit and send more replies.
Step 3: Add a knowledge base (optional)
If you want drafts grounded in your real facts — pricing, opening hours, product details, a returns policy — add a knowledge base. Upload documents such as a price sheet, an FAQ, or product docs, and the assistant retrieves the relevant passage before drafting, so replies quote your actual information instead of guessing. This step is optional: the assistant works fine on tone alone, but a knowledge base is what turns good drafts into accurate ones for a support or sales inbox.
Step 4: Review your first drafts
As new mail arrives, the assistant classifies it and, for messages that need a reply, writes one and saves it straight to your Gmail or Outlook drafts folder — right where you'd expect a draft to be, not in a separate app. Open the draft, read it, edit anything you want, and click send when it's right. Nothing is ever sent for you. The first few drafts are the moment to correct anything off — a wrong assumption, a tone that's too formal — and those edits feed back into better drafts.
Step 5: Adjust your labels
Finally, check how your inbox is being sorted. The assistant applies an action-oriented label or category to each message — Needs reply, Support, Sales, Invoices, and so on — as a real Gmail label or Outlook category. If something lands in the wrong place, correct it the same way you'd move any email; that correction is a signal the model uses to sort that sender better next time. Keep the set small — five to seven categories cover almost any inbox.
You stay in control the whole way. DraftKite never sends, deletes, or moves your mail, and you can revoke its access in one click from your Google or Microsoft account settings — not just from inside DraftKite. Revoking stops all access immediately.
That's the whole setup — connect, learn, add facts, review, adjust — and most of it happens automatically after Step 1. Start the 7-day free trial, no card required, and watch your first labeled inbox and drafted replies appear today.