Since September, Perplexity has offered an email assistant that is particularly useful for high-activity users.
It’s one of the most time-consuming tasks in modern work, yet few tools can truly automate it. Despite the integration of Gemini in Gmail or Copilot in Outlook, intelligent email management using generative AI has made little progress in recent years. Lack of context, confidentiality of exchanges, excessively large volumes… There are still many obstacles. By announcing Email Assistant last September, Perplexity made a clear promise: to give busy users time by simplifying the quest for “inbox zero”. The JDN was able to test this assistant and, surprise, it keeps its promises.
The real strength of Email Assistant
The real difference between Email Assistant and tools like Gemini, Copilot or other email management artificial intelligences lies in its asynchronous operation. Perplexity’s AI is able to process messages without direct human intervention. More than a simple assistant, it is a proactive agent: it gradually learns from your exchanges, assimilates your writing style, your standard responses and builds a personalized context of understanding. Thanks to this, it can take care of the complete management of your mailbox, automatically classify messages by category (marketing, notifications, to reply, urgent, etc.) and offer you a summary view of priorities at a glance.
Once the classification has been established and continually updated, the AI generates personalized response drafts, adapted to the context of previous exchanges. She adopts not only your usual tone, but also your way of formulating answers. Better yet, synchronization with your calendar allows it to automatically offer appointment slots consistent with your actual availability. Result: we go from five minutes to write an e-mail to a few seconds to validate a draft. Over a working day, the time saving becomes considerable, especially for users with a large email flow. As an added bonus, the tool is compatible with the GDPR and SOC 2 certified.
To install Perplexity Email, nothing could be simpler. Simply go to https://www.perplexity.ai/assistant and click on your provider (Gmail or Outlook). Intelligent email management then begins instantly.
Our experience
The Perplexity Email Assistant is currently only available for Gmail and Outlook. We tested it for two weeks on a professional Gmail box. Onboarding is fluid: before starting, the assistant prompts you to enter several parameters, including your meeting preferences (working hours, meeting duration, minimum time between two appointments), the usual meeting location and the tags you want to activate.
By default, Perplexity Email applies eight automatic labels to your messages:
- To Respond : emails requiring a quick response.
- FYI : purely informative messages, with no action required.
- Awaiting Reply : thread waiting for response.
- Meeting Update : notifications related to meetings.
- Actioned : conversations already processed.
- Cold Email : unrequested requests, to be processed according to availability.
- Notifications : automatic alerts (LinkedIn, social networks, etc.).
- Marketing : promotional content or newsletters.
Overall, the automatic classification proved to be relevant and consistent. The only downside: the numerous press releases received were systematically placed in the Marketing category, while some would have deserved a response (we are here for a very specific business need). However, Perplexity only writes drafts for emails classified as “To Respond”. Despite this limitation, the time saving is undeniable. It becomes possible to sort your inbox without opening each message, while gradually learning to trust the assistant. The drafts generated turned out to be clear, well contextualized and often directly usable: during our two weeks of testing, less than 10% of the suggested answers required a complete rewrite. Finally, and this is undoubtedly the most appreciable, no need for an external tool or complex commands: the assistant, entirely asynchronous and directly connected to your inbox, works natively in Gmail and Outlook.
The only real problem with Email Assistant
The main weak point of Email Assistant? Its price. We were able to test the tool for fifteen days thanks to the free trial offered by Perplexity, but to continue using it, you must subscribe to the Perplexity Max subscription, billed at $200 per month. A high amount, especially since, unlike the premium formulas of Anthropic or OpenAI, the exclusive advantages of the Max offer remain limited: early access to new products, unlimited use of Perplexity Research, unlimited use of frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, or even video generation and priority support. Interesting bonuses, certainly, but far from justifying such a price for use focused on messaging.
Finally, there remains a major unknown: the reaction of OpenAI, but also that of the historical giants that are Outlook and Gmail. If ChatGPT were to integrate asynchronous and contextual email management, Perplexity’s advantage could quickly erode. And the same would be true if Microsoft or Google decided to enable this type of functionality directly into the heart of their email clients, which would provide them with immediate leverage thanks to their massive user base. In the meantime, Perplexity Email remains one of the most successful experiences for anyone looking to regain control of their mailbox at a high price.
