Why we built Safemail AI

Last week we launched the public beta of Safemail AI. Our answer to the fact that despite best efforts, billions of malicious emails land in people's inboxes every year. As we were onboarding some of our customers one of them asked me, where did we get the inspiration, so I thought I’d write a small post on it.

Just over a month ago we launched Delphi. A demonstrator chat interface we put together to answer questions about cyber security for our clients. Anything from “is this a threat” to “what does this compliance control” mean.

That said, we were never convinced that chat was the optimal interface for working with LLMs. Our product lead was particularly enthused about finding the “real” way we should be bringing the power of these models to products.

It must have been serendipity then that a few weeks after launch, the 2 main sources of inspiration landed before us in very quick succession. First, one of our early power users asked us “hey, I know I can upload files, but can I give it an email? I think this one is dodgy”. Followed quickly in rapid succession of receiving a screenshot of an email from my mother with her asking “is this thing safe” (a habit she’s been a fan of since I started my career in cyber security)

It was made clearly evident then, that one of the most valuable use cases we had was looking at emails, and incidentally this meant that we had a solution to our interface problem at the same time.

Email, broadly speaking, is a “solved problem”. There are countless, very good tools out there that enterprises can use to tackle it. They’re not perfect, but when used in conjunction with other controls, you can have Pretty Good Confidence™️ that your estate is secured from these kinds of threats.

The challenge with these tools is that you need a certain type skills in your organisation to configure and use them. Most small organisations don’t have these kinds of skills in-house. Your tiny mom and dad shop that has been around for a few decades is likely still running the same tiny IT estate they have for years, and almost certainly hasn’t turned on all the fancy new features they have come out, because why would they, they’re not cyber security experts.

Users don’t want to need to install new software or tools, nor configure email plugins. They want to feel confident and safe to use email, but will churn quickly if frustrations arrive at getting there. Safemail removes all of those problems, instead moving the solution to the email button they already know and love. The forward button.

No configuration needed. No setup (literally, you don’t even need an account to get started). Just forward us any email, and within a couple of minutes you’ll get a reply from us telling you whether it's safe or not, with some advice and next steps for in case you've clicked on anything.

Naturally the first thing done when launched was to get it Mom Certified™️ to ensure that problem was solved, and we're happy to report that is has been.

Safemail is still very early. We’re big fans of shipping quickly and iterating so we’ve got some nice enhancements on the roadmap for the next few weeks, but we’re already happy with the results. One of our B2B SaaS clients is already asking if it can check every email against it since that's where they do a lot of their commercials, an offering we’ll launch publicly in a few weeks.

Try it out for yourself, forward any email to agent@inbound.safemail.ai and get confidence in email back.