These AI tools can help manage your cluttered email inbox

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My inbox seems poised to explode. When I dive into deep work, I return to find email overflowing. To cope, I’m exploring how AI can help with searching, sorting, summarizing, and replying. Read on for a summary of new AI capabilities for saving time on email.

Spend less time on routine email

If you devote 90 minutes or more a day to email, as many of us do, consider one or more of these five steps.

1. Automate drafting of routine replies. Shortwave AI can draft editable responses in your style, based on hundreds of your prior replies.
2. Quickly grok long threads. Superhuman AI lets you press M to get an instant bulleted summary of any long email. Alternatively, you could paste a thread into ChatGPT, or ask it to draft an email, but AI in your inbox is swifter.
3. Write shorter emails—five sentences max. Opt into Gmail’s Workspace Labs, then type “Write for me.” To improve a draft, ask it to expand, shorten, or otherwise adjust. Six AI features are available to test within Gmail.
4. Delay your replies. Slow down back-and-forth threads. Use Mailbutler’s Smart Send Later to postpone delivery. As Adam Grant puts it, “Your email does not constitute my emergency.”
5. Simplify your exchanges. Use Boomerang’s Respondable AI within Gmail or Outlook to conclude threads efficiently. See how it looks.

Shortwave is great if . . .

. . . you want an AI assistant that can draft new messages in your own writing style. Shortwave can look at your prior replies to determine how to draft a response that sounds like you.

• Check out the Shortwave team’s email efficiency method.
• Prompt the ChatGPT-like bot to intelligently find messages or insights in your inbox. Its answers can save you from hunting through your archive.
• Send email in multiple languages.
• Free for basic use, or $7 to $14 per month, depending on features.

Use Superhuman if . . .

. . . you want summaries of long email threads, use AI on both desktop and mobile, rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts, or want to prompt AI with informal text it can use to create email drafts for you.

This is my day-to-day email tool because I’ve customized my setup over the past few years, though its AI features lag those available in Shortwave.

My favorite Superhuman features aren’t actually the AI ones.

• The AI-generated emails tend not to match my style, having been trained only on a tiny subset of my outbound messages.
• I appreciate instead how quickly pages load, how useful its keyboard shortcuts are for navigating through my inbox and replying to messages, and how helpful its snippets are for templatizing my frequently sent emails.
• I also like the contact pane that shows contextual info about your email correspondent drawn from LinkedIn and other social platforms next to their message.
• Pricing: For students and teachers, Superhuman costs $10 per month, but for everyone else, it’s a steep $30 per month.

Try Ultra if . . .

. . . you want AI to show you tasks sitting inside your inbox. Ultra also lets you customize how it summarizes your email. And you can chat with it. Type “Show me the most important of today’s messages,” to see significant emails sifted out from inbox clutter. There’s even a metrics tab, showing you how many messages you’ve received lately, among other stats. Ultra, having recently launched, feels a bit raw to me, lacking features that Superhuman, Shortwave, and others offer.

Consider Spark if . . .

. . . you want the cheapest AI email offering, $5 per month; if you’d like to choose between short or detailed AI-generated summaries; or if you’d like AI editing help to proofread, rephrase, or adjust the tone of your messages.

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.

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