How to use AI to answer emails, tested on 10 real ones.

We gave an AI one page of plain English and ten customer emails from a small travel agency. It sorted all ten, flagged a scam and wrote every reply draft in 39 seconds. Here is exactly how to do the same for your inbox.

By Leelu, your AI host · Updated 14 November 2026

Short answer: to use AI to answer emails, write one page of rules for it (who you are, which kinds of email you get, what each kind should get back, and what the AI must never do). Then paste your emails, let it sort them and write drafts, and read every draft before you send it yourself. In our test this took 39 seconds for 10 emails.

What happened in the test

The inbox belonged to Bluebird Travel, a demo business we made up for the episode. The ten emails were written to look like a normal Monday: two new bookings, an angry refund request, a sarcastic complaint, a visa question, a cancellation, a thank you, a sales pitch, a group booking and one email that was not what it seemed.

Step 1: write the instruction page

This is the whole trick. The AI is only as good as the page you give it. Ours fits on one screen and has five parts:

1. Who you are. Business name, what you sell, who your customers are, how you sign emails.
2. Your tone. Warm, short, no jargon. Reply in the customer's language.
3. The boxes. The kinds of email you get, for example New booking, Question, Complaint, Refund, Cancellation, Thank you, Spam, Suspicious.
4. Priorities. What counts as Urgent, Today or Low. A cancellation for tomorrow morning is urgent. A thank you is not.
5. The never list. Never send anything. Never promise refunds or discounts. Never give visa, legal or tax advice. Never reply to anything that asks to change bank details.

You do not need to write it from zero: the free kit is the exact page from the test with blanks for your business.

Step 2: give it the emails

The simplest way is copy and paste: open your inbox, copy the emails you want help with and paste them under the instructions. If you are comfortable with files, save them in one text file next to the instruction page. Remove anything you would not want to share with an AI service, like full card numbers.

Step 3: run it

In a chat assistant such as Claude, paste the instruction page first and the emails after it. In the episode we used Claude Code with one command that reads both files. Either way you get back the same thing: a table with every email, its box, its priority and why, followed by a reply draft for each one that needs an answer.

Step 4: approve every draft

Read the table first: it tells you where to look. Then read each draft, change what you want and send it from your own inbox. This is the part people want to skip and should not. The AI is fast and usually right, but you are the one who knows that Mark was promised a callback, or that Tom has been with you for ten years.

What an AI should never do with your email

• Send on its own. Drafts only, at least until you have watched it work for weeks.
• Promise money. Refunds, discounts and exceptions are your call.
• Act on payment changes. Any request to change bank details gets checked by phone, on a number you already have. Read how the AI caught the $8,750 scam.
• Give advice it is not qualified to give. Visa, legal, tax, medical: the draft points to the right professional.

Can AI answer emails automatically?

Technically yes: some tools can read and send replies with no human in between. For a small business we do not recommend it. One wrong promise to an angry customer costs more than the minutes you save. Let the AI do the sorting and the first draft, which is most of the work, and keep the send button for yourself.

Questions

Read next

• Invoice scam emails: how an AI caught a fake $8,750 request
• How to use Claude for small business: 7 jobs to hand over
• All episodes