Auto-drafts is Ellie's flagship feature: connect your Gmail or Outlook account and Ellie reads your incoming emails, categorises them, and writes draft replies — ready and waiting in your inbox. You don't click anything. You just open your email and the drafts are there.
The pipeline
When a new email arrives in your connected inbox:
- Categorisation — Ellie reads the email and assigns it to one of your categories (e.g. "to respond", "fyi", "marketing")
- Draft decision — if the category type is Reply Required , Ellie drafts a reply. If it's Informational or Action Required, no draft is created
- Draft creation — Ellie generates a reply using your Role and any Knowledge Base content you've given it, then saves it as a draft in your inbox
- Label/category — for Gmail, Ellie applies a label (e.g. "Ellie/to respond"); for Outlook, it applies a category. This makes it easy to filter and surface drafted emails
The whole pipeline takes a few minutes from when the email arrives.
What you see in your inbox
The drafted email looks like any other draft — it sits in the email thread, ready to send. Open the email, review the draft, edit as needed, and send. Ellie never sends anything automatically.
For Gmail: set up Gmail Priority Inbox to surface Ellie's drafted emails at the top of your inbox.
For Outlook: use categories to filter and surface Ellie's drafted emails.
What you need for auto-drafts to work
- A connected Gmail or Outlook account (see Connect your inbox )
- Auto-categorisation turned on — go to your account and turn on automatic categorisation
- Auto-drafts turned on — on the same account, turn on Auto-Drafts (this is unavailable if auto-categorisation is off)
- At least one "Reply Required" category (Ellie creates these by default)
Auto-drafts vs. the browser extension
| Auto-drafts | Browser extension |
|---|---|
| How it triggers | Automatically, when email arrives |
| Where it works | Gmail / Outlook connected accounts |
| What you do | Review and send; nothing else needed |
| Setup required | Connect account + turn on toggles |
Most users do both: connect their account for hands-off auto-drafts, and keep the extension installed for when they want to draft something manually.
Turning auto-drafts off
To turn off auto-drafts entirely: go to app.tryellie.com/accounts , click your account, and turn off Auto-Drafts.
To stop Ellie drafting for specific types of email (without turning everything off), adjust your categories. See Stop Ellie creating unwanted drafts .