# Lindy AI Assistant: Set Up Inbox Triage, Drafts and Briefs > Set up Lindy as a personal email assistant: labels, drafts in your voice, follow-up bumps, alerts, daily briefs, meeting prep and its Gmail extension. _Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/lindy-ai-assistant — The Professional's Toolkit · updated November 2026_ --- Lindy (often searched as Lindy AI) becomes a personal email and executive assistant once you connect a Gmail or Outlook inbox. It labels incoming mail, drafts replies in your voice, drafts nudges for threads that went quiet, and sends a daily brief plus a briefing before meetings. Paid plans start from $29.99 per user a month (3,000 credits) [1]. Plus connects 2 inboxes, Pro 3 and Max 5. Most assistant work sits at the cheap end of Lindy's credit scale. The verdict: it suits one busy person who lives in Gmail or Outlook and wants drafts, not autopilot. Drafts wait for you by default. If you want an assistant that answers mail on its own from day one, this is not that. **2 / 3 / 5** — Connected Gmail or Outlook inboxes on Plus, Pro and Max; Enterprise sets a custom number. - **Very low** — Credit impact of briefs, alerts, nudges and meeting prep - **1, 2, 3, 5 or 7 days** — Follow-up bump delays you can choose - **$29.99 per user a month** — Starting price, with 3,000 credits ## Step one: connect an inbox and pick where you will talk to it The assistant is the private Lindy, the one in your DMs, texts and email, not the shared teammate that answers in Slack channels. Its full toolset of calendar, email, SMS, reminders and meeting reads only works in direct messages and your own threads; in a shared channel it sticks to public sources. That split shapes setup. You do not need Slack at all for the personal side, because the web app, iMessage or SMS, Lindy's own email address, voice memos and the Chrome extension in Gmail all reach the same assistant. Connect Google or Microsoft email and calendar first, since drafting, labeling and alerts all need a connected Gmail or Outlook inbox. The plan sets how many. **Plus allows 2 connected inboxes, Pro 3, Max 5**, and Enterprise a custom number [2]. A founder with one work and one personal Gmail fits on Plus; an assistant who also covers a shared sales inbox and a second business needs Pro. Settings are kept per inbox, so each one can label and draft differently. Billing follows people, not inboxes. Every person who uses Lindy becomes a billed seat, so an executive and the assistant who manages that executive's mail count as two. All seats feed one workspace credit pool, monthly credits do not roll over, and when the pool runs dry Lindy pauses the work instead of sending an overage bill. Nobody gets a surprise invoice. Those rules apply across the whole product, not only to the assistant. > 💡 **Create a label before triage:** Email labeling does nothing until at least one label exists. Keep labels on keep-in-inbox for the first week, then turn on archiving where the sorting is right. ## Build the labels before you switch on triage Email labeling is a built-in routine for Gmail or Outlook that sorts incoming mail and can archive it. **It does nothing until at least one label exists** [3]. The defaults are To Respond, FYI, Newsletters, Comments, Notifications and Invoices. Each label carries its own instructions, and each can either move mail out of the inbox or leave it where it is. That second choice deserves thought. Archiving newsletters is harmless, while archiving Invoices can hide a bill your bookkeeper expected to see in the inbox. You set triage preferences by chatting in plain English rather than writing filter rules. Tell Lindy that anything from a named client belongs in To Respond, or that receipts from your payment processor should skip the inbox, and it adjusts. Start narrow. Leave most labels on keep-in-inbox for the first week, read what landed where, then turn on archiving for the categories it sorts correctly. Tiddle, a six-person influencer agency, says Lindy screens about 500 inbound emails a day, qualifies brand deals and escalates what needs a human; that is the customer's own figure, not a typical result. ## Drafts in your voice, and bumps for threads that go quiet Email drafting places replies in your drafts folder, written in your voice and informed by the thread, your calendar and connected apps. By default, nothing goes out until you approve it. Lindy learns your style from the edits you make, and you can open and change those learned instructions, your signature and an optional Sent with Lindy footer. Drafting works in English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish and most other major languages. Since October 2026, drafts in Outlook keep your full signature, logos and links included, picked up from your recent sent mail. Follow-up bumps is a separate routine. When an email you sent gets no reply, Lindy drafts a follow-up for review after a delay you choose: never, or after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 7 days. It runs independently of drafting, so you can switch on one without the other. After a call, Lindy can also turn meeting notes into a follow-up email and remind you if nobody answers. **Once the drafts read right, recurring follow-ups can be set to auto-send.** That switch is yours to flip. Until you do, every bump waits in drafts for a human. > ⚠ **Auto-send is your switch:** Drafts and follow-ups wait for approval by default, but recurring follow-ups can be set to send automatically. Turn that on only once the drafts read right. ## Alerts, a morning brief and prep before each meeting Email alerts follow instructions you write yourself: flag time-sensitive meeting requests, mail from a list of VIP senders, or movement on one specific thread. They arrive by text, Slack DM, Lindy chat or your default channel. Alerts need a connected inbox, and a workspace admin can turn them off. The daily brief is a personal routine that lands at a time you pick, by Slack DM, SMS, iMessage or Lindy chat. It covers whatever you prompt it to cover, so one brief can be today's calendar plus overdue replies and another just the three deals that matter this week. Meeting prep sends a briefing with the time, title and attendees, each external attendee's job title, company and LinkedIn profile, and summaries of past meetings with the same people. You choose all meetings or external ones only, and a daily digest or a note minutes before each call, delivered by email, SMS or iMessage. Labeling, drafting, alerts, bumps, the brief, prep, meeting recording and scheduling are all built-in routines, each toggled per connected account. Booking links and CC scheduling get their own walkthrough in our [scheduling assistant guide](/articles/lindy-scheduling-assistant), and recording is covered in the [meeting notes guide](/articles/lindy-meeting-notes). > 💡 **Write alerts as plain instructions:** Alerts follow rules you write, such as VIP senders or one specific thread, and can arrive by text, Slack DM or Lindy chat. ## Running it from Gmail and from your phone The Chrome extension, added in August 2026, is free to install in three steps: add it from the Chrome Web Store, pin it, open Gmail [4]. It is Gmail only for now; Outlook is listed as coming soon. Inside Gmail it adds color-coded triage labels, a morning brief card, draft replies with quick actions, a compose bar that replaces Gmail's own Help me write, label learning, and a sidebar chat with voice input, attachments and a model selector. It also opens a Lindy home on every new tab. Everything there stays personal. On a phone, no app is needed. Lindy is reached by iMessage on an iPhone or SMS on any phone, once you verify a number at signup. By text you can schedule meetings, ask about past meetings, set email alerts, summarize links, and send voice notes that Lindy transcribes and acts on. On Android, RCS has to be turned on in Google Messages. Voice notes become Notion pages only when Notion is connected. Drafts sitting in Gmail or Outlook can also be reviewed and sent from any modern mobile browser, which covers the airport-gate approval. Ad hoc requests work through the same channels. Ask what a client said on last month's call or which commitments you made in a thread, and Lindy pulls the answer from your emails and meetings; it also summarizes any URL or YouTube link. Research asked in a DM stays private. One caution applies here. Per-integration guardrails only act in shared Slack threads, not in DMs, web chat or texts, so the safety net in private use comes from the draft-first routines themselves, not from guardrail settings. ## What the assistant spends from the credit pool The personal side is the light end of Lindy's meter. Lindy's docs rate the daily brief, email alerts, follow-up nudges and meeting prep as Very low credit impact, and catch-up summaries and meeting recaps as Low; ad hoc research varies with the job. Lindy's pricing page puts everyday asks, such as drafting a reply or summarizing a thread, in a range of 2 to 250 credits. Routines spend every time they run, so frequency drives the bill, though a daily brief uses very few. Long threads cost more. Each new message re-reads everything above it. Your assistant draws from the same workspace pool as every other Lindy on the account, and a busy shared channel moves that balance faster than one person's DMs. Admins can set a monthly credit cap per person. At the cap, that person's credit-using actions pause until the next cycle, though a task that started under the limit runs to completion. Lindy has no ongoing free plan. A new account starts with $50 in free credits that last 7 days, a short window to watch the labels, drafts and briefs work on your real mail; after that a paid plan is needed. ## FAQ **Does Lindy train AI models on my email?** Lindy states that neither it nor its providers use customer data to train AI models, and that Google API data is not used for model training. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. **What happens to my drafts if the workspace runs out of credits?** Lindy pauses credit-using actions until the monthly reset rather than billing overage. An admin can buy top-ups at $10 per 1,000 credits, and those credits do not expire. **Does the Chrome extension cost extra?** No. It is free to install, and the work it does runs on your workspace's plan credits like any other Lindy request. **Can I change assistant settings without digging through menus?** Yes. Lindy's docs say the personal Lindy's settings can be changed by asking it in plain language, including over iMessage. ## Where the private assistant ends and the team teammate begins Set up in this order, Lindy is one person's inbox assistant: labels first, drafts and bumps second, alerts, briefs and prep third, with the Gmail extension and text messages as the remote control. It stays private. The shared teammate that answers in Slack channels, runs workspace routines and reads team memory is a separate layer, and teams without Slack get only the personal side. If an executive and an assistant will split the work, read how the two roles divide in our [executive assistant guide](/articles/lindy-for-executives) before you add the second seat. ## Sources [1] Lindy pricing — https://www.lindy.ai/pricing (2026-11) [2] Product: everything Lindy can do — https://www.lindy.ai/product (2026-11) [3] Lindy documentation: Email Labeling — https://docs.lindy.ai/features/inbox-management/email-triage (2026-11) [4] Lindy documentation: Chrome Extension — https://docs.lindy.ai/features/chrome-extension (2026-11) [5] Lindy documentation: Billing — https://docs.lindy.ai/teammate/lindy-teammate-billing [6] Lindy Terms of Service — https://www.lindy.ai/terms-of-service [7] Trustpilot: Lindy reviews — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/lindy.ai