Ellie
Ellie is an AI email assistant for Gmail and Outlook that drafts your replies overnight, in your own Drafts folder. It learns your voice from sent mail, writes only replies, never cold emails, and sends nothing without you.
What is Ellie?
Ellie is an AI email assistant published by Ellie Assist Ltd, a British company. The idea is deliberately narrow: you connect your mailbox, Ellie reads the threads that call for an answer, and it writes the reply overnight. In the morning the drafts are simply there, as native drafts, in the original thread, under the same Gmail or Outlook button you already use, so your shortcuts, filters, search and signature all keep working. The voice is meant to be yours. Ellie models your writing from the emails you have already sent, down to the length of your openings, your sign-offs and your habitual turns of phrase, and it never produces the same reply twice. There are three ways to use it. The connected mailbox does the automatic drafting with nothing to install. A browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox adds an on-demand button, and a native Outlook add-in, published on Microsoft AppSource, does the same from the ribbon. Supported accounts include Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook.com, Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 Government, shared mailboxes included. Accuracy comes from what you feed it. A knowledge base can crawl your website automatically and re-index it weekly, take uploaded files and give specific URLs more weight; the publisher says it refuses to make up facts that aren't in source. Structured data, a spreadsheet or a CRM export, is looked up record by record as the draft is written, so a renewal date, a plan tier, a ticket status or an order number lands in the answer. Roles let you keep several personas, each with its own knowledge base and tone, selected automatically or chosen per email. Optional read-only Google Calendar access lets Ellie suggest meeting slots, and Google Tasks handles follow-ups. Ellie replies in any language while keeping your tone, and the interface itself comes in eight. Drafting runs on OpenAI and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, through a single 'Intelligent AI model' tuned for email on every plan. The homepage claims 9,000+ Chrome installations, 4.0/5 on the Chrome Web Store, 2.3 million replies written and an average 42 minutes saved a day; the AppSource listing cites 9,000+ installations and 173,000+ business emails generated. Two more products, Ellie Desk (a shared support inbox) and Ellie Docs (documentation that writes itself), are announced in early access. And one limit comes from the publisher itself: Ellie writes replies, never cold emails.
What it does
- Connect Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 in one click through OAuth
- Let Ellie learn your writing style from the emails you have already sent
- Wake up to replies already drafted, waiting in your Drafts folder
- Categorise incoming email automatically (Business and Professional plans)
- Build a knowledge base from a crawled URL, PDF, DOCX or TXT files, or a CSV and CRM export
- Set up Roles, giving each hat you wear its own knowledge base and tone of voice
- Trigger a reply on demand from the browser extension or the Outlook add-in
When to use Ellie / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Ellie is the right fit.
When to use Ellie
- Salespeople and account managers who start every morning clearing a backlog of inbound replies
- Founders and CEOs running a full inbox on their own, with no assistant to delegate to
- Recruiters and estate agents answering the same candidate or property enquiries over and over
- Customer support teams, who can feed a knowledge base and CRM exports into each reply
- Anyone who finds replying hard, whether through reply anxiety, dyslexia or writing in a second language, and who does not want to leave Gmail or Outlook to get help
When not to use Ellie
- Anyone chasing cold outreach: the publisher states that Ellie will only write replies to emails, not cold emails
- Buyers of the entry-level plan who expect automation: Casual is manual-only, with no auto-drafting, and every plan except Professional caps the number of replies per day
- Mobile-first users, as there is no native iOS or Android application
- Teams wanting to wire an email assistant into their own stack: there is no public API, and CRM or helpdesk integrations are only announced as coming soon
- Organisations that require a signed customer data processing agreement, or that cannot allow email content to pass through OpenAI and Microsoft Azure OpenAI
How to use Ellie
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign in at app.tryellie.com and connect your Gmail or Outlook account in a single click
- Let Ellie read your sent emails so it can learn how you write
- Train it further if you want: paste a URL to crawl, drop in a PDF, DOCX or TXT file, or upload a CSV or CRM export
- Create Roles if you wear several hats, each with its own knowledge base and tone
- Leave it alone, as automatic drafting needs no installation of any kind
- Open your inbox the next morning and read the replies waiting in your Drafts folder
- Adjust a word if needed, then send: nothing goes out on its own
- Optionally install the browser extension (Chrome, Edge, Firefox), which adds a button to the compose window in Gmail Web and Outlook Web and lets you pick the Role reply by reply
- Optionally install the native Outlook add-in and trigger a reply from the ribbon; an IT administrator can deploy it across a whole tenant from the Microsoft 365 admin centre
- For other clients such as Apple Mail or Fastmail, generate the reply in the extension window and paste it in; full guides are on help.tryellie.com
Pros & Cons
Pros
- It lives in the mailbox you already use: nothing new to learn, and drafts appear under the usual Gmail or Outlook button
- Automatic drafting needs no installation and no daily action, so the value arrives before you open your inbox
- A firm and repeated commitment that email content is not retained and that no model is trained on it
- A named, itemised list of sub-processors, published in a level of detail that is rare
- Primary hosting in the EEA (DigitalOcean, Frankfurt) with a dedicated EU Azure OpenAI endpoint, and calendar data redacted before it leaves the calendar layer
- A Google CASA Tier 2 security review passed, and GDPR rights extended even to people outside the UK and EU
- A seven-day trial with no card required, purchase also available through Microsoft AppSource on your existing Microsoft invoice, an interface in eight languages and replies in any language
Cons
- No postal address is published anywhere on the site, on any page
- No customer data processing agreement is published, although the Business and Professional plans are sold to teams, and no Article 27 EU representative is designated for this British company
- Broad mailbox access is required, including the restricted Gmail scopes that cover the content of your messages
- Daily reply quotas apply to every plan except Professional, and the entry-level Casual plan has no automatic drafting at all, so the flagship feature starts one tier up
- No public API, with CRM and helpdesk integrations announced as coming soon, and no native mobile application
- The pricing table is rendered in JavaScript, so no amount appears on the public page, and plan labels on the site still contradict the AppSource listing
- Hashed marketing identifiers are shared with LinkedIn and Meta on a legitimate interest basis, and the site links to no official social account
Pricing & Plans
No free plan is documented. Ellie offers a seven-day free trial with no card required, after which a subscription is necessary. The lowest paid entry point is the Casual plan at USD 19 per month; Business is USD 39 per month and Professional USD 79 per month, with additional seats from USD 5 per user. A full refund is granted on request, but only for payments made less than 60 days earlier. The subscription can also be bought as a SaaS offer through Microsoft AppSource. These amounts come from the AppSource listing published by the vendor: the site's own pricing page renders its figures in JavaScript and shows no amount in the HTML.
- 25 replies a day
- individual use
- manual mode only through the browser extension
- Basic Knowledge Base Training
- 100 replies a day
- 3 seats included
- team sharing
- automatic drafting and automatic categorisation
- Advanced Knowledge Base Training
- one connected account per user
- email support within two working days
- unlimited replies
- 5 seats included
- priority support
- up to three connected accounts per user
- Additional seats from USD 5 per user
- on top of those included in the plan
- A seven-day free trial with no card required is available on every plan
- All amounts as published by the vendor on Microsoft AppSource
- the site's pricing page showing no figure in its HTML
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Ellie handles your data.
GDPR overview
Ellie Assist Ltd is a UK company invoking both the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR explicitly. Its privacy policy, effective 15 May 2026, lists the rights it grants: access, rectification, objection, portability, human review of automated decisions, and withdrawal of consent. It extends them to non-residents too, 'because we believe you should possess them regardless of where in the world you live'. Rights are exercised by email to hi@tryellie.com or by deleting the account in the app. Primary hosting is in the EEA (Germany); UK-EEA transfers rely on the mutual adequacy decisions, and sub-processors outside the UK and EEA (OpenAI, Pinecone, Sentry, Better Stack) are covered by the UK IDTA or the UK addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses. Joint controller agreements are signed with LinkedIn and Meta for ad measurement. Two gaps remain: no Article 27 EU representative is designated, and no data protection officer is named.
Who owns the data?
Ellie Assist Ltd puts it plainly: 'Your data will always remain yours.' The company undertakes never to sell data to third parties, and never to sell or transfer Google user data to anyone for advertising, data brokerage or credit scoring. Email content is not held on Ellie's servers: each thread is read as the draft is written, then discarded. What is kept is narrow: the generated draft and the prompt fragments the feature needs. OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256, separately for each user and each integration. You can delete your account from the app or by email, after which data is removed from active systems within 30 days.
Reuse rights
Ellie collects account data (name, email address, hashed password, and billing handled by Stripe), the content of the connected mailbox (messages, threads, drafts, labels and metadata), whatever you put in the knowledge base, plus product analytics and logs. Mailbox content serves three purposes only: categorising incoming messages, drafting replies, and modelling your writing style. To produce a draft, Ellie sends the relevant thread fragment, the knowledge base extract and the role instructions to its AI providers, OpenAI and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, both of which are configured and contractually bound not to train their base models on that data. Google data is never used for advertising or marketing. The Google Calendar integration is more restrictive still: titles, descriptions, locations, organisers and attendee identities are stripped server-side before anything leaves the calendar layer, so only timings, free/busy status, whether an event recurs, the number of attendees and two booleans travel onward. Google Tasks access is limited to the tasks Ellie itself creates in its own 'Ellie' list. Human access to your content happens only with your explicit consent, for security reasons, under a legal obligation, or on aggregated and anonymised data. One use sits outside the product: for marketing measurement, Ellie shares server-side with LinkedIn and Meta a SHA256 hash of your email address and name, your country code and a click identifier, at sign-up and at purchase, relying on legitimate interest under UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f); you can object by email. Product analytics runs on PostHog in cookieless mode, in the EU region, with a non-reversible daily server-side hash.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Application servers and the MongoDB database run on DigitalOcean in the Frankfurt region of Germany, inside the EEA, with DigitalOcean Spaces object storage holding the embeddings and the knowledge base files. Product analytics is hosted by PostHog in its EU region, and drafting requests go to a dedicated EU Azure OpenAI endpoint. The privacy policy states that 'personal information is stored on secure servers in the EEA'. Some sub-processors sit outside that perimeter: OpenAI, Pinecone, Sentry and Better Stack typically process in the United States, and those transfers are framed by the UK IDTA or the UK addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, with encryption in transit and at rest. Transfers between the United Kingdom, where Ellie Assist Ltd is established, and the EEA rely on the mutual adequacy decisions.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Ellie.
- No postal address appears on the site, so the publisher is identifiable only by its company name, and the legal entity changed country in May 2026, from Ellie Assist OU in Estonia to Ellie Assist Ltd in the United Kingdom
- No Article 27 EU representative is designated for a British company handling the data of EU residents, and no customer data processing agreement is published despite the team plans
- The tool requires the restricted Gmail scopes, which means it reads the content of your messages
- Hashed identifiers (email address, name) are shared server-side with LinkedIn and Meta on a legitimate interest basis, and the only way to object is by email
- The terms of service point out that a generated reply may be inaccurate and that you remain responsible for what you send, so the drafts are worth rereading rather than sending blind
- Parts of the site are out of step with the product: plan labels still mention GPT-3-turbo, GPT-4 and GPT-4o models and a limit of 10 replies a day, contradicted by the pricing FAQ and by the AppSource listing
- The promotions on display carry mutually inconsistent dates (a 25% coupon marked as expiring on 10 July alongside an early Black Friday 40% banner), and the site declares its canonical page on tryellie.com, which makes ellieai.com a mirror domain
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Connecting the mailbox is one OAuth click with Google or Microsoft, and automatic drafting needs no installation at all. The browser extension is an optional download from the Chrome, Edge or Firefox stores, while the Outlook add-in can be installed individually or pushed to a whole tenant by an IT administrator from the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Training the knowledge base means pasting a URL or dropping in a file. No technical skill is needed for individual use, and the publisher sums it up as: 'If you can use email today, you can use Ellie tomorrow.'
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Ellie
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Does Ellie read my emails?
Are my emails used to train AI models?
Which email accounts does Ellie work with?
Do I have to install anything?
Will Ellie send emails on my behalf?
Can Ellie write cold emails?
How do I teach Ellie something new?
Why is there a daily limit on replies?
How do I delete my data?
Where is my data hosted?
Should you pick Ellie?
Ellie's proposition is unusually clear: remove the first hour of inbox work without asking you to move anywhere. The drafts land in Gmail or Outlook, written in a voice learned from your own sent mail, and nothing leaves your account until you press send. For anyone whose morning starts with forty near-identical replies, that is a concrete saving rather than a promise. What lifts it above the average AI writing tool is the care visible in the plumbing. Email content is not stored, models are not trained on it, hosting sits in the EEA with an EU endpoint for the AI calls, calendar entries are stripped of anything identifying before they leave the calendar layer, and Google's CASA Tier 2 security review has been passed. The list of sub-processors is named in full, which is rarer than it should be. A seven-day trial with no card, and the option to buy through Microsoft AppSource, keep the cost of finding out low. The reservations are administrative rather than technical. No postal address appears anywhere on the site, no customer data processing agreement is published even though two of the three plans are sold to teams, no Article 27 representative is designated, and the absence of a public API caps how far the tool can be wired into a CRM or a helpdesk. The pricing page renders its figures in JavaScript, so the amounts live only on the AppSource listing, and some plan descriptions on the site contradict them. Behind all this is a young, deliberately small publisher: a British entity registered in September 2024, Estonian before that, with no outside investors. Judge Ellie on the drafts it writes for you during the trial; the rest is a matter of what your organisation needs on paper.
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