Cora
Cora is an AI assistant that plugs into Gmail and Google Workspace. It screens your inbox, drafts replies in your own voice and summarizes everything else in a twice-daily Brief. It never sends or deletes mail.
What is Cora?
Cora is an agentic email assistant wired into Gmail and Google Workspace. Its terms describe it as an “agentic artificial intelligence service for use with your Google email”, covering the reading, archiving, drafting, storing and summarizing of messages and attachments. The homepage organizes the product around three moves: Cora screens your email, drafts responses in your voice, and Briefs the rest.
Screening keeps the messages judged important in the inbox and archives the others. Nothing disappears: what is archived is filed under a Next Brief label you can open at any time. Twice a day, in the morning and in the afternoon, Cora sends a Brief, a summary of the non-urgent traffic — newsletters, notifications, invitations, FYI threads — delivered by email and readable on the web, with the claim that it “lets you read your inbox in 30 seconds instead of 3 hours”.
Drafts are produced only when your history gives enough context. They land in your Gmail Drafts folder and are never sent: the publisher states that Cora has neither the ability nor the permission to send or delete mail. When you sign up, Cora analyzes a selection of your email history to work out whom you answer quickly, which messages you act on and how you write. From then on you steer it by talking to it, in chat or by email, the way you would brief a chief of staff, and it remembers what you tell it.
Cora runs alongside Gmail rather than replacing it, so there is no new application to learn. Its scope is deliberately narrow: it handles mail arriving after activation, and clean-up of an existing backlog is announced as work in progress. Under the hood it relies on models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. On security the site claims Google Verified status, CASA Tier 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance, and says it holds no backdoor access to your emails. Everything can be switched off at any moment, feature by feature, from the settings.
The tool is published by Every (Every Media, Inc.), a media and software company behind a daily AI newsletter and the sibling products Spiral and Sparkle. Users quoted on the homepage include Mike Krieger, Kevin Roose and Andrew Wilkinson.
What it does
- Screens your Gmail inbox and leaves in front of you only the messages that call for a reply
- Archives everything else under a Next Brief label so nothing is lost
- Drafts replies in your own voice and files them in your Gmail Drafts folder
- Sends a Brief twice a day, morning and afternoon, summarizing the non-urgent mail
- Learns your priorities on its own by analyzing your email history
- Takes new instructions by chat or by email and remembers them
- Handles up to two mailboxes on the Professional plan, or an unlimited number on Unlimited
When to use Cora / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Cora is the right fit.
When to use Cora
- Founders and executives who carry the inbox load of someone with a chief of staff, but have no human assistant
- Heavy Gmail users buried under newsletters, notifications, invitations and FYI threads
- Professionals who answer the same kinds of messages over and over and want first drafts written in their own voice
- Consultants, writers and other solo operators who bill by the hour and want their mornings back
- People juggling several Gmail or Google Workspace mailboxes, for whom the Unlimited plan adds as many accounts as needed
When not to use Cora
- Anyone on Outlook, iCloud or any provider other than Gmail and Google Workspace, which Cora explicitly does not support
- Users looking for an auto-responder: Cora writes drafts but never sends and never deletes an email
- Anyone hoping to have a backlog cleared: Cora only handles mail that arrives after activation, and inbox clean-up is still announced as work in progress
- Teams wanting a shared or delegated mailbox: the product is individual, and the Unlimited plan adds email accounts, not colleagues
- Buyers who need a permanently free tool, a public API, a mobile app or integrations beyond Gmail: none of these exists
How to use Cora
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open cora.computer and click Start free trial or Get Started to reach the sign-up page
- Create an account and connect your Gmail or Google Workspace mailbox
- Let Cora analyze a selection of your email history to learn your priorities and your writing style
- Provide a payment method: the seven-day trial converts automatically into a subscription unless it is cancelled
- Let Cora screen incoming mail — important messages stay in the inbox, the rest is archived under the Next Brief label
- Read the morning Brief, then the afternoon one, to catch up on everything that was set aside
- Review the drafts Cora leaves in your Gmail Drafts folder, edit them, then send them yourself
- Correct Cora’s behavior by talking to it in chat or by email: whom to screen out, what to surface, what to ignore
- Add a second mailbox on the Professional plan, or more on the Unlimited plan
- Switch off a single feature, or Cora entirely, from the settings whenever you want
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A hard guardrail: Cora has neither the ability nor the permission to send or delete emails
- No archived email is lost — the Next Brief label keeps everything one click away
- Explicit commitment that Google Data is never used for training, by the publisher and by the model providers alike, with zero data retention
- The publisher claims no backdoor access to mailboxes, alongside Google Verified status, CASA Tier 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance
- Nothing to install and no migration: you keep working inside Gmail as before
- Low entry price against the promise made (USD 20 per month), plus an Every bundle at the same price covering Cora, Spiral and Sparkle
- Fine-tuning happens through conversation, with no rules engine to learn, and any feature can be switched off individually
Cons
- Gmail and Google Workspace only: Outlook and every other email provider are unsupported
- An unresolved contradiction on training — the homepage promises that your data is never used to train models, while the terms grant a perpetual license over Submissions and Content that expressly covers training; only Google Data is explicitly excluded
- No permanently free plan: a seven-day trial that converts automatically into a paid subscription
- No refunds, and cancelling mid-term may still trigger billing for the remainder of the cancelled term
- No published DPA, no Article 27 EU representative, hosting and processing in the United States only, and logs or anything entered into the models may be kept indefinitely
- Mail already sitting in the inbox before activation is left untouched
- No public API, no mobile application, no documentation page, and no interface language other than English is announced
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanently free plan. Cora offers a seven-day free trial, after which the lowest entry point is the Professional plan at USD 20.00 per month, billed annually as USD 240. The trial converts automatically into a paid subscription unless it is cancelled beforehand; subscriptions renew automatically and no refund is granted.
- 2 email accounts
- AI inbox organization
- pre-drafted replies
- daily Brief summaries and technical support
- everything in the plan above
- plus an unlimited number of email accounts
- access to all Every products (Cora
- Spiral and Sparkle) and to the publisher’s content
- subscribed separately on the Every website
- Yearly (save 20%) or Monthly
- the amounts above are the ones displayed under yearly billing. Two inconsistencies are visible on the page: the Unlimited plan lists “Everything in Basic” although no Basic plan is shown
- and 20 x 12 equals the 240 announced
- so the promised 20% saving does not appear in the figures
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Cora handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR is addressed explicitly and at length. Every Media, Inc. identifies itself as a data Controller and EEA, UK and Swiss users as Data Subjects. The policy lists its legal bases — legitimate interest, performance of the contract, legal obligation and revocable consent — and enumerates eight rights: information, access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and freedom from automated decision-making. The service performs no automated decision-making and no profiling. Requests go to privacy@cora.computer or to the Privacy Officer at 920 Broadway, New York. The homepage FAQ claims compliance with GDPR, ISO 27001 and CASA 2, while the policy is more guarded: “We will take commercially reasonable steps to maintain compliance with GDPR.” Missing: no Article 27 EU representative, no named DPO, no standard contractual clauses, no DPA. Transfers to the US rest on user consent alone. Policy effective 1 January 2026.
Who owns the data?
The terms state that Every Media, Inc. will not claim ownership of your Submissions or Content. In the same breath, you grant the publisher a perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable, non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, display, distribute and create derivative works from that material, including to train, develop and improve its models. You also warrant that your submissions hold no confidential information and waive compensation or attribution, and these licenses survive termination. Google Data, meaning the contents of your Gmail, is carved out: neither the publisher nor its third-party AI providers use it for training, under a zero data retention policy. The publisher remains sole owner of the service, the models and their outputs, and acts as GDPR controller.
Reuse rights
You keep ownership of what you feed into Cora, and nothing in the terms restricts your own reuse of it: no permission has to be asked. Drafts are delivered into your Gmail Drafts folder, where you read, edit, rewrite or discard them and decide alone whether to send. The reservation lies elsewhere. The terms declare the service, the models and any output of the models to be the publisher’s sole and exclusive property, which sits awkwardly beside the free reuse of the drafts Cora writes for you; the point is not clarified anywhere on the site. Cora’s trademarks, logos and trade dress may not be used beyond what the agreement allows. Personal data can be accessed, corrected or deleted on simple request to privacy@cora.computer.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
All processing and storage take place in the United States. The privacy policy states that personal data “may be processed by us in the United States” and that the information you provide “will be securely stored in our servers and internal systems located within the USA”. Visitors from outside the country are told their connection may run through and to servers located in the USA, and the Territoriality section demands, in capitals, consent to that transfer and processing, with US law claimed as applicable. No alternative hosting region — European Union, United Kingdom or Asia-Pacific — is offered. The third parties involved are named: OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini as Third-Party AI Providers, plus Google, PostHog Inc. in San Francisco and Google LLC in Mountain View for analytics. The payment processor is not named, and the publisher states that it does not hold financial data itself. Security is described as physical, electronic and managerial procedures with strong encryption, with no guarantee of absolute security. Missing: no data processing agreement is published or offered, and there is no dedicated trust or security page.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Cora.
- You are handing a third party read access to your entire Gmail correspondence, professional and confidential threads included — and while the homepage states Cora cannot delete mail, the terms describe the service as able to delete messages
- The training question is not settled: the homepage promises no training on your data, while the terms grant a perpetual, sub-licensable license over Submissions and Content that expressly covers model training. Only Google Data is carved out
- The terms require you to warrant that your submissions contain no confidential information, a clause that is hard to honor the moment a work mailbox is connected
- Delegating triage has a cost: an important message misfiled into the Brief may not surface for up to half a day
- Cognitive drift — you gradually lose first-hand knowledge of your own inbox, come to rely on an AI-written summary of it, and sign drafts written “in your voice” that may have been skimmed rather than read
- Logs, technical records and anything entered into the models may be kept indefinitely, and all processing takes place in the United States, with consent to the transfer imposed by the policy and no standard contractual clauses or EU representative
- The seven-day trial rolls over automatically into a paid subscription, after which no refund is available, even on cancellation mid-term
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Nothing to install, no code and no browser extension: you create an account and connect your Gmail or Google Workspace mailbox through Google sign-in, and a payment method may be requested from the trial onwards. Cora then learns from your email history on its own, so there is nothing to configure at the start, and later adjustments are made by talking to it in plain language rather than by writing rules. One reservation: on Google Workspace, authorizing a third-party application may depend on your domain administrator.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Cora
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Does Cora write and send emails on my behalf?
Which email providers does Cora work with?
Do I use Cora instead of Gmail, or alongside it?
How does Cora know which emails matter to me?
What exactly is a Brief?
What if Cora puts an important email in the Brief?
What happens to the thousands of emails already in my inbox?
Is it safe to let Cora read all my email?
Where is my data stored?
How much does Cora cost, and is there a free trial?
Should you pick Cora?
Cora does one thing and does it deeply: it takes over the Gmail inbox rather than trying to be a general-purpose assistant. The product guardrails are real — it never sends and never deletes, everything archived stays reachable under the Next Brief label, and any feature can be switched off from the settings. Getting started asks nothing more than a Google sign-in, and the tool is steered in plain language, not through rules.
The security posture is announced loudly — Google Verified, CASA Tier 2, ISO 27001, GDPR — but it rests on a homepage FAQ, not on a trust page, a certificate or a data processing agreement. One grey area deserves a careful read before connecting a professional mailbox: the homepage promises that your data is never used for training, while the terms grant Every Media, Inc. a perpetual, sub-licensable license over your Submissions and Content that expressly covers training the models. Only Google Data, the contents of your Gmail, is excluded from training, under a zero data retention policy. We do not settle that contradiction; we report it, and it is for the publisher to clarify.
The dependency on Google is total: outside Gmail and Google Workspace, Cora does not exist. The commercial model is simple and unforgiving: two plans, no permanent free tier, a trial that converts on its own, no refunds. The publisher is identified (Every Media, Inc. in the legal documents, though the footer credits Cora Computer LLC), publishes a postal address and contacts, and has documented a USD 2 million seed round; the company is young, its domain registered in July 2024.
For a founder or executive who lives in Gmail without an assistant, Cora is a focused proposition. For anyone bound by confidentiality duties, the licensing language deserves legal review first.
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