Email Assistant by Superhuman Mail (Outlook)

Email Assistant by Superhuman Mail brings Auto Labels, Auto Archive, Auto Drafts, and Auto Reminders directly into your existing Outlook inbox — no new app, no browser extension required.

Email Assistant is an AI agent that works quietly in the background of your Outlook inbox. After a one-time setup, it handles the repetitive email work for you: labeling incoming messages, archiving noise, drafting replies in your voice, and following up on conversations that need a response.

💡 Tip: For the best Email Assistant experience, turn on conversation view in Outlook. Conversation view groups messages from the same email thread together, helping Email Assistant understand the complete conversation and display drafts, categories, and reminders where you expect to see them.

To turn on conversation view:

New Outlook: Go to Settings → Mail → Layout. Under Message organization, select Show email grouped by conversation.
Classic Outlook: Go to View → Show as Conversations → This folder or All mailboxes.
Outlook on the web: Go to Settings → Mail → Layout. Under Message organization, select Show email grouped by conversation.

If your Outlook settings are managed by your organization, contact your IT administrator for help enabling conversation view.

Complete onboarding

Once you purchase Email Assistant, you’ll go through an onboarding process where you learn about each feature:

Auto Labels: assigns each new email one of six labels — Respond, Waiting, FYI, Notifications, Promotions, or News — so you can quickly understand its priority and required action.
Auto Archive: automatically removes the types of lower-priority messages you choose from your main inbox without deleting them, helping you reduce clutter.
Auto Drafts: prepares responses to incoming emails and follow-ups to unanswered messages using your context, voice, tone, and preferences.
Auto Reminders: resurfaces sent emails when a response hasn’t been received, helping you remember when to follow up.

When onboarding is complete, you’ll land on your Dashboard. We recommend taking a few minutes to review your Personalization details and the settings for each feature. This is where you can decide how you want Email Assistant to categorize your emails, prepare drafts, and surface conversations for you.

It may take a few hours after onboarding for Email Assistant to finish processing and categorizing your emails. New Email Assistant folders and categories will appear progressively in Outlook, so don’t worry if your inbox does not appear fully organized immediately.

💡 Tip: Complete your Personalization details as thoroughly as possible. The more context Auto Drafts has about you, your work, and how you communicate, the better it can match your voice.

Auto Labels

Auto Labels help you understand what each email means for you without opening every message. In Outlook, Auto Labels appear as categories. Email Assistant automatically assigns every incoming email one of six labels:

Respond: Needs your reply
Waiting: You’re waiting to hear back
FYI: Useful information with no action needed
Notifications: Automated updates and alerts
Promotions: Marketing messages and offers
News: Newsletters and digests

Each email receives one Auto Label, making it easier to see what needs your attention and what can be reviewed later.

Auto Labels work alongside your existing organization system. Email Assistant will not remove or replace categories you created in Outlook.

How Auto Labels appear in Outlook

How Auto Labels appear depends on your version of Outlook:

In New Outlook and Outlook Web, Auto Labels appear as named categories on the message.
In Classic Outlook, categories appear as colored squares in the message list. Respond, FYI, and Waiting have distinct colors, while Notifications, Promotions, and News may appear as gray squares. You can open the email to see the category name.

This visual difference does not affect how Email Assistant categorizes your email.

Customize Auto Labels

Auto Labels are a complete set of six — you can’t disable, rename, or replace them individually.

Remove an Auto Label

To remove an Auto Label from a specific email in Outlook:

Select the email.
Select Categorize.
Clear the checkmark beside the Auto Label you want to remove.

If the Auto Label isn’t visible, select All categories.

Removing the category does not change or remove the email itself. The change applies only to that email thread — it does not create a rule or teach Email Assistant to categorize similar messages differently in the future.

Auto Archive

Auto Archive keeps lower-priority email out of your main inbox without deleting it. You choose which types of email within Notifications, News, and Promotions are archived and which stay in your inbox.

Emails labeled Respond, Waiting, or FYI cannot be automatically archived.

Each day, Email Assistant also sends you a Daily Digest that shows what was moved out of your inbox.

Turn on Auto Archive for a category

In your Auto Archive settings, switch on Auto Archive for Notifications, News, or Promotions. Then choose what happens to each type of email within that category.

Setting changes apply to new incoming email. They don’t move emails you’ve already received.

Choose which types of email are archived

Within each category, set each type of email to Inbox or Archive:

Notifications: Automated updates from apps and services, such as security and sign-in alerts, payments and bills, renewals, deliveries, calendar updates, comments and mentions, incidents, and receipts.
News: Newsletters and periodic content from publishers, such as paid subscriptions, newsletters you regularly open, breaking news and market alerts, and digests.
Promotions: Marketing emails and outreach, such as expiring offers, recruiter outreach, sales and marketing emails, cold sales outreach, partnership and PR outreach, and fundraising messages.

For example, if you want most Notifications out of your inbox but never want a security alert to get buried, switch on Auto Archive for Notifications, keep Security & sign-in set to Inbox, and set the types you don’t need to see right away to Archive.

💡 Tip: If there’s a type of email you never want archived, set it to Inbox. To always see email from a specific person or domain, add them to Never archive.

Default settings

When you set up Email Assistant for the first time, Notifications, News, and Promotions are switched on for Auto Archive by default. Default exceptions help keep important types of email in your inbox. You can review and change these settings during onboarding or at any time afterward.

If you already used Auto Archive, your category settings stay the same. Email Assistant doesn’t switch on Auto Archive for a category you previously turned off. For categories you already have on, you can now choose which types of email are archived. For example:

If Auto Archive is on for Notifications, it stays on, and you get new controls for types such as security alerts, payments, deliveries, and receipts.
If Auto Archive is off for News or Promotions, it stays off. If you switch it on later, you can choose which types of email are archived.

Find an Auto Archived email

When a message is Auto Archived, it is removed from your main inbox but is not deleted. You can still find it using its Auto Label category, Outlook search, or the Auto Archived folder.

Choose which senders are archived

Sender overrides let you control how Email Assistant handles specific senders, regardless of your category settings. In your Auto Archive settings, add a name, email address, or domain to one of these lists:

Always archive: New conversations from that source skip your inbox and go straight to Auto Archive, even if that type of email would normally stay in your inbox.
Never archive: New conversations from that source stay in your inbox, even if that type of email would normally be archived.

Sender overrides take priority over your other Auto Archive settings. For example, if you archive sales and marketing emails but add a sender to Never archive, their new conversations stay in your inbox.

Senders and domains you have previously emailed are automatically excluded from label-based Auto Archive. Your Always archive and Never archive preferences let you override this behavior for specific senders or domains.

Outlook spam filtering can take priority over Never archive. Email Assistant can’t move an email into your inbox if Outlook has already classified it as junk.

Get a Daily Digest of archived email

The Daily Digest is an email that summarizes what Auto Archive moved out of your inbox, so you can review it without the clutter building up throughout the day.

The Daily Digest is on by default. To switch it off, go to your Auto Archive settings.
It arrives at 5pm in your local time. If your time zone isn’t available, it arrives at 5pm Pacific.
You can’t change the delivery time.
You need Auto Archive switched on for at least one category to receive a digest.

You can use Auto Archive without the Daily Digest. They are separate settings.

If you also use the Superhuman Mail app

Granular Auto Archive controls, such as Security & sign-in and Payments & bills, are managed in your Email Assistant settings. They don’t appear in the Superhuman Mail app settings yet, but they keep working when you use the app. To see or change them, return to your Email Assistant settings.

Auto Drafts

Auto Drafts prepare personalized email drafts in your voice, using the context of each conversation and how you have communicated with that recipient in the past.

Email Assistant can prepare two types of drafts:

Response drafts: Replies to incoming emails that need a response.
Follow-up drafts: Follow-ups for sent emails that have not received a response.

Auto Drafts consider details such as your typical level of formality, word choice, greeting, signoff, and message length. They can also adjust the tone based on the recipient — for example, writing differently to your manager than to a close colleague.

Review and send a draft

Auto Drafts appear as standard drafts in Outlook and are never sent automatically. You can review, edit, send, or delete them just as you would any other draft, without changing the original email.

For the best experience, keep conversation view turned on. If conversation view is off, an Auto Draft may not appear within the relevant email thread. If you don’t see it there, open your Drafts folder in Outlook to find it.

Draft responses to scheduling requests

When someone emails you to schedule time, Auto Drafts can check your availability across your connected calendars and suggest times when you are free. Your drafts will also take the scheduling preferences in your Personalization settings into account.

You can also configure scheduling drafts to add a teammate on Cc when you want that person to help coordinate the meeting.

Choose which drafts are created

In your Email Assistant settings, you can:

Turn Responses and Follow-ups on or off separately.
Limit Response drafts to people you have emailed before.
Choose whether scheduling drafts should add a teammate on Cc.

Improve your Auto Drafts

Auto Drafts learn from the emails you have previously sent and should improve as you continue using Email Assistant. If your drafts do not sound like you, review your Personalization settings and add more information about your preferred writing style, greeting, signoff, company context, scheduling preferences, and other relevant details.

💡 Tip: The more complete your Personalization settings are, the more context Auto Drafts will have to prepare responses that sound natural and fit each conversation.

Auto Reminders

Auto Reminders bring sent emails back to your inbox when they have not received a response. When a reminder is due, the relevant conversation resurfaces so you can review it and decide whether to follow up.

For the best experience, keep conversation view on. In Classic Outlook with conversation view off, a reminder may appear as a separate message without a direct link to the original conversation.

Set an Auto Reminder

Open Set Reminders in your Email Assistant Dashboard to choose:

How many days Email Assistant should wait.
What time the reminder should appear.
What should trigger the reminder, such as not receiving a reply.
Whether the reminder should count weekdays only.

You can return to this page at any time to change these preferences or turn Auto Reminders off.

Auto Reminders and Follow-up drafts

Auto Reminders and Follow-up drafts work together but perform different actions:

Auto Reminder: brings the conversation back to your inbox at the time you selected.
Follow-up drafts: prepares a message you can send when your original email has not received a response.

Follow-up drafts are controlled separately in your Auto Drafts settings.

FAQs

Is there a mobile app?

Email Assistant does not require a separate mobile app. It connects directly to your Outlook account, so its work appears automatically in the Outlook mobile app.

Do I need to use the Superhuman Mail app?

No. Email Assistant works directly inside your existing Outlook inbox. You do not need to switch email applications or install a browser extension to use its features.

Depending on your subscription, you may also have access to the Superhuman Mail app, but it is not required to use Email Assistant.

Why should I turn on conversation view?

Conversation view groups messages from the same email thread together. This helps Auto Drafts and Auto Reminders appear alongside the relevant conversation, making them easier to understand and act on.

Email Assistant can still work with conversation view off, but some features may appear in different locations or without a direct link to the complete conversation.

How can I tell what Email Assistant has done?

You can identify Email Assistant’s work directly in Outlook:

Auto Labels appear as Outlook categories.
Auto Archived messages are removed from your main inbox but remain available through their category, Outlook search, or the Auto Archived folder. If you have the Daily Digest on, you also get a daily email summarizing what was archived.
Auto Drafts appear as standard Outlook drafts. They are never sent automatically.
Auto Reminders bring the relevant conversation back to your inbox when it may need a follow-up.

Can I choose which types of email Auto Archive moves?

Yes. Within Notifications, News, and Promotions, you can set each type of email to Inbox or Archive. For example, you can archive most Notifications but keep security alerts in your inbox. Go to your Auto Archive settings to customize these.

I already use Auto Archive. Did my settings change?

No. Your category settings stay the same, and Email Assistant doesn’t switch on Auto Archive for a category you previously turned off. For categories that are on, you can now choose which types of email are archived.

What happens if a sender override conflicts with my category settings?

Your sender override takes priority. A sender in Never archive stays in your inbox, and a sender in Always archive skips your inbox, regardless of your category settings.

Can Auto Archive archive an important email by mistake?

Auto Archive includes safeguards to keep important email in your inbox, and some safeguards may keep an email in your inbox even when your settings would archive it. If there’s a type of email you don’t want archived, set it to Inbox. If there’s a person or domain you always want to hear from, add them to Never archive.

Will changing my Auto Archive settings move emails I already received?

No. Changes apply to new incoming email only.

When does the Daily Digest arrive, and can I change the time?

The Daily Digest arrives at 5pm in your local time. You can’t change the delivery time. You can switch the Daily Digest off in your Auto Archive settings.

Why do Auto Labels appear as colored squares in Classic Outlook?

Classic Outlook displays categories as colored squares in the message list. Open the email to see the complete category name.

Respond, FYI, and Waiting have distinct colors. Notifications, Promotions, and News may appear as gray squares. This is a visual difference in Classic Outlook and does not affect how Email Assistant categorizes your email.

Why don’t I see categories or drafts yet?

Email Assistant begins processing your inbox after you finish onboarding. You may begin seeing categories and drafts within approximately 15 minutes, but larger inboxes can take two hours or longer to finish processing.

Information will appear progressively during this time. You do not need to keep the settings dashboard open or take any additional action.

How do I manage settings for multiple email accounts?

Each connected email account has its own settings. Changes made for one account do not automatically apply to your other accounts.

Visit your Email Assistant settings and use the account selector in the upper-right corner to choose the account you want to manage. Configure Auto Archive, Auto Drafts, Auto Reminders, calendars, and Personalization separately for each account.

How do I add another email account?

To connect another Outlook account:

Open your Email Assistant settings.
Select Accounts or Add accounts.
Select Add account.
Sign in to the Outlook account you want to connect.

After connecting the account, review its features and Personalization settings separately.

How do I disconnect an email account?

Open Accounts in your Email Assistant settings, then select Sign out beside the account you want to disconnect.

Disconnecting an inbox does not cancel a paid subscription.

How do I cancel my subscription?

If your organization manages your subscription, contact your account administrator.