AI email assistant: what it actually does, and what stays yours

There are two kinds of AI reply systems. One writes and sends on its own; the other writes and waits for you. BoxBee deliberately belongs to the second kind: the AI drafts the reply, places it next to the incoming message, and then nothing happens until you have read it, edited it and sent it yourself. No draft leaves without you.

The reason is simple. A mail that goes out in your name is a commitment, a price, a tone towards a customer. One wrong answer costs more than the draft saves. So BoxBee takes over the beginning, not the decision: the draft arrives in the language of the incoming message and in the tone you configured, and you turn it into the finished reply in seconds.

BoxBee works fully automatically where a mistake is cheap and instantly reversible. The autopilot classifies every arriving message by kind and urgency, files messages that clearly belong to an ongoing matter into the right dossier, and puts marketing and bulk mail into quarantine instead of the inbox. Nothing is deleted, every decision is visible and can be undone with one click, and the autopilot learns from that undo.

Just as important is what the autopilot does not do: it sends nothing, replies to nothing on its own and deletes nothing. That combination is the design: the dull, always identical moves run without you, and everything that goes out into the world runs through you.

The moment an AI reads your mail to draft replies, it processes personal data. That is true of every vendor, BoxBee included. Whether deployment is permissible in your organisation is decided by your own assessment, not by a marketing page. What BoxBee can contribute are verifiable facts about how it is built.

AI requests go to Mistral, a model developed in France, and are processed on servers in Europe. No US cloud provider such as AWS, Azure or GCP sits in the data chain, so there is no access route via the US CloudAct. Mail contents and passwords are not stored on BoxBee servers; your credentials stay encrypted in your device keystore. The vendor, TTA Technologies, is based in Luxembourg. That is not a certification and not legal advice, but it is a chain without a change of legal jurisdiction, which is the first thing data protection officers ask about.

Yes, and this is where many AI mail offerings fall down. BoxBee is a mail client, not a mail provider: it does not host mailboxes and does not hand out addresses. Your mailbox stays with whoever provides it today, and BoxBee connects to it over IMAP and SMTP.

In practice that means: no migration, no new address, no forwarding rules, no change to the contract with your mail provider. You install BoxBee on macOS, Windows, iPhone or iPad, enter your existing credentials and keep working with the same address as yesterday, only with a sorted inbox and drafts waiting next to the messages.

Have an agency or consultancy build you a custom AI reply automation and you quickly land at four-figure project prices, plus running costs for hosting and maintenance, plus the risk that the bespoke setup breaks at the next API update.

BoxBee is a finished product with fixed prices instead: Free at EUR 0 with one mail account and 30 AI actions per month, no payment method needed. Solo at EUR 12.99 per month, Pro at EUR 19.99 per month, each with 7 days free. And BYOK at EUR 4.99 per month if you bring your own Mistral API key. A full year of Pro costs less than a single consulting day, and the Free plan lets you find out whether it helps you at all before you spend a cent.

In the morning you do not open forty lines, you open the daily brief: one page summarising what arrived since yesterday, which matters moved, where somebody is waiting for an answer from you, and which appointments of the day came out of mail. In one minute you know what today looks like.

Then you work through the open items. Next to every message that needs an answer sits a draft in the right language and your tone: you read, change two sentences, send. Four minutes per mail become half a minute. In the background the autopilot has long since quarantined the bulk mail and filed the messages belonging to ongoing matters into their dossiers. The amount of mail is the same as before, but it is a different working day.