Getting started with ReciteMail

1What ReciteMail is

ReciteMail is a private drafting assistant that writes email replies in your own voice, on your own PC. It sits beside Outlook, Gmail or any inbox you already use. It never connects to your mailbox and nothing sends without you. You show it the email you are answering, tell it what you want to say and it writes the full reply. You paste the result into your inbox and send it yourself, like always.

If you have not installed it yet, download ReciteMail for Windows first. The free trial runs seven days with no card needed.

2Sign in and start your trial

1. Open Settings from the sidebar and find the ReciteMail Account card at the top of the Profile tab.
2. Click Create account, enter your email and a password, then click the link in the verification email that arrives.
3. Back in the app, click Start 7-day trial. The trial gives you twenty drafts a day and the card shows how many you have left.

This account is only for drafting and billing. It is completely separate from your email accounts, which ReciteMail never touches.

3Meet the window

ReciteMail lives in your system tray rather than fighting for space on your taskbar. Press Ctrl Alt G to summon the window and press the same keys to dismiss it. Closing the window just tucks it back into the tray.

You will also see a small floating bar that stays on top of whatever you work in. Its buttons drop straight into Compose: snip a region of your screen, dictate a brief or read a window. If the bar is not for you, close it and it stays off.

All of this is adjustable under Settings then Window Behaviour, including Hide when I click away, which makes the window vanish the moment you click into another app. Whenever you want a refresher, Settings has a Take the tour button under Getting Started. The Guide tab in the sidebar holds this whole guide plus the videos, with a shortcut to the right screen from every section.

4Your identity and signature

1. In Settings, open the Profile tab and find Your Identity. Enter your name, your email address and your business name, then click Save identity. This is how ReciteMail knows which messages in your history were written by you and which came from customers.
2. Scroll to Email Signature. Paste your real signature straight from your email client, logo and formatting included, then click Save signature.

From now on every draft you copy out of ReciteMail carries your signature automatically. What you paste into your inbox is the finished email.

5Teach it your voice

This is the step that makes ReciteMail sound like you rather than a robot: importing your past email.

1. Open the Library tab and click How to export. The guide walks you through Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and more, step by step.
2. Once you have an export file, click Import files or use Import folder for a whole folder of messages.
3. After importing, click Re-scan senders once so every message is labelled correctly using the identity you just saved. Colleagues on your own email domain show as Colleague, customers as Customer and your own messages as You.

Your sent folder is the gold. Those are emails written in your voice and every future draft samples them so the phrasing, the warmth and the length match how you actually write. A few hundred sent emails is a great start. Everything you import is stored encrypted on this device and it is never uploaded in bulk anywhere.

6New to the job? House voice

Starting a role where someone else handled the inbox before you? Their sent mail can teach ReciteMail how your business writes, while every draft is still signed as you.

1. Import the previous person's Sent folder exactly as you imported your own. You do not need their password, only an export of the folder, which the person leaving or the owner can make in a few minutes.
2. When most of a batch was written by someone who is not you, ReciteMail asks whether to treat them as the house voice. Say yes.
3. Their messages now count like yours for tone and phrasing. Your name and signature stay on every draft.
4. Changed your mind or want to add the owner too? Settings, Profile, House voice. Add or remove people there and the Library relabels itself.

No previous person? The owner's sent mail does the same job. The point is that the business keeps its voice when the person at the keyboard changes.

7Company Facts and Templates

Two more inputs pay off every single day.

• Company Facts, in the Profile tab. Write down the plain facts of your business: your returns window, your lead times, your opening hours. Drafts can then state these to customers confidently instead of leaving blanks for you to fill.
• Templates, in the sidebar. Click New template for the replies you send often or Import to bring in template files you already have.

A template is a guide, not a script. The assistant reshapes it around each real email, fills in the details and keeps your voice. The tenth customer never receives word for word what the first one did.

8Contacts and guardrails

In Settings, find Suppliers & Contacts and click Manage contacts. Add your regular suppliers, clients and partners with their email domains and a line about what they do. Pin the ones you deal with most.

One guardrail is worth knowing: when you write to a customer, a related contact is used as private background only. Your supplier is never named to the customer. If you resell or drop ship, that protection is built in.

Finally, Banned Words. Add the words you never want in a draft, with separate lists for customers and for contacts. If a banned word ever slips through, the draft warns you before you copy it.

9Your first draft

1. Open Compose and choose who this is for: Reply to customer or Write to a contact for suppliers and partners.
2. Brief the assistant. Click the microphone and say what you want to get across in your own words or type it in the same box. You are not dictating the email. The assistant writes the full reply from your brief.
3. Show it the email you are answering. The fastest way is Snip: press Ctrl Alt S, drag a box over the email on your screen and it lands in Compose.
4. Pick a Tone if the moment needs one, then click Create draft.
5. Happy with it? Click Copy to clipboard and paste into your email client. Formatting and signature come along. You send from your own inbox.

The reply comes out in whatever language you briefed in. A Spanish brief gets a Spanish email.

10Power tools

• Read my screen captures a window you pick, your inbox for example, then drafts straight from it with no copying at all.
• Search the web for facts looks up real product details when a customer asks something technical, with sources shown for your own check.
• Paraphrase selection: highlight a sentence in the draft for instant rewrites.
• Revise: type an instruction like "make it firmer about the deadline" and the draft is reworked without starting over.
• Translate works in both directions. Translate an incoming email so you understand it or translate your finished draft before it goes out.
• References, under the draft, shows the past threads a draft learned from.

11For teams and new starters

Solo user? Skip to the last section. Getting a small team onto ReciteMail (or setting up someone who starts on Monday) takes minutes per seat.

1. On your machine, open Settings, then the Data tab and click Export team pack. Tick what to share: templates, company facts, banned words, contacts and the house voice list. Your name, email and signature are never included. The file is safe to hand to anyone on the team.
2. On each team machine: install ReciteMail, sign in, open Settings, Data, click Import and choose the team pack. The confirmation lists exactly what came in.
3. For a new starter, import the previous person's Sent folder and say yes to the house voice prompt (chapter 6).
4. Each person then sets their own name under Your Identity and their own signature under Email Signature. Over time their own sent mail joins the mix.

That is the whole rollout: shared templates, one house voice, personal signatures.

12Protect your setup

Everything ReciteMail stores lives encrypted on this device. For an extra gate, open Settings then Security and set an App Lock. The simple lock asks for a password when the app opens. The strong lock goes further and encrypts the keys themselves. If you choose strong, write down the recovery code it gives you and keep it somewhere safe, because without your password or that code your imported mail cannot be recovered.

Then make a backup: Export settings saves your identity, contacts, templates, signature and house voice list to a single file you can restore any time.

If anything is unclear, write to info@recitemail.io and a human answers.