Your inbox is full of AI-generated emails and most of them are not labelled. Mass sales outreach, AI-personalised newsletters, phishing attempts that used to require native English speakers — all of it now flows from the same language models that power ChatGPT. Knowing how to spot them protects your time and your security.
Why AI Emails Have Exploded
Sending personalised emails used to require human writers. Today, a single person with access to ChatGPT and a contact list can generate thousands of individually personalised cold emails in an hour. The same applies to phishing: AI-generated phishing emails are dramatically more convincing than the broken-English attempts of five years ago. They are grammatically perfect, contextually relevant, and free of the obvious errors that used to make scam emails easy to spot.
The volume problem is equally significant. AI email tools send at scale. Where a human sales team might send 200 emails a day, an AI-assisted team sends 20,000. Your inbox is increasingly a battleground between AI senders and human readers.
The 6 Signs an Email Was Written by AI
1. Generic personalisation
AI email tools insert personalisation tokens — "I noticed you work at [Company]" or "I saw your recent post about [Topic]" — but the body of the email is completely generic. Real personalised outreach references something specific. AI personalisation references the fact that personalisation exists.
2. Perfect but impersonal opening
AI emails almost always open with a compliment or reference: "I came across your work and was really impressed." Humans sometimes do this too, but AI does it with a specific rhythm — the compliment, then a transition phrase, then the pitch. Every time. Human writers break this pattern.
3. The transition phrase pile-up
Look for: "Furthermore", "Additionally", "It is worth noting", "In conclusion", "I hope this email finds you well", "I wanted to reach out". No single human uses all of these. An email containing three or more of these phrases in 150 words is almost certainly AI-generated.
4. No specific ask with a specific reason
Human sales emails have a specific ask tied to a specific reason. AI emails have a vague ask: "I would love to connect", "Let me know if you would be open to a conversation", "I would be happy to share more." The ask is always deniable and non-committal because the AI is optimised to avoid rejection.
5. Uniform sentence length throughout
Read the email aloud. Does every sentence take roughly the same amount of time to say? Human emails have natural rhythm variation — short sentences for emphasis, longer ones for explanation. AI emails have metronomic consistency.
6. Zero personal detail that would require knowing you
A human sender who actually researched you can reference something specific — a talk you gave, an article you wrote, a product decision you made publicly. AI-generated "personalised" emails reference only things available in a LinkedIn profile because that is what the tool was given. If the only "personal" detail is your name, job title, and company, it is AI.
The Phishing Angle — Why This Actually Matters for Security
AI-generated phishing emails are the most significant security development of the past three years. Traditional phishing relied on volume and poor quality — send a million broken-English emails and a small percentage clicks. AI phishing uses quality and targeting — send a few hundred highly convincing, contextually relevant emails to high-value targets.
The warning signs are the same as generic AI email, with one addition: urgency. AI phishing emails almost always include manufactured urgency — "your account will be suspended", "action required within 24 hours", "immediate response needed". Legitimate organisations almost never create genuine emergencies over email.
How to Check Any Email with the AI Email Detector
The Anonymiz AI Email Detector is purpose-built for email content analysis. To use it:
- Copy the full email body — subject line, greeting, body text, and signature
- Paste into the detector at anonymiz.com/ai-email-detector
- Select your AI engine — Groq is free and instant
- Click Check Email and review the score and signal breakdown
The detector is particularly good at identifying the hedging language and transition phrases that dominate AI sales and phishing emails. A score above 70% on an unsolicited email is a strong signal to treat it with scepticism.
What to Do With a High-Scoring Email
- Sales outreach: You are under no obligation to respond to AI-generated sales emails. File or delete without guilt.
- Potential phishing: Do not click any links. Navigate directly to the referenced service by typing the URL. Call the company on a number you find independently — not one in the email.
- Newsletter or content: Your choice whether to continue reading. But knowing it is AI-generated is useful context for how much you trust the information.
- Professional context: If a colleague or partner sent an obviously AI-generated email, it is worth a gentle conversation about communication norms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can it detect AI phishing emails specifically?
Yes. AI phishing emails contain the same statistical patterns as other AI content, plus typically higher urgency language. The detector analyses all of these signals. A high score on a suspicious email is strong grounds to treat it as a potential phishing attempt.
Does it work on emails in other languages?
The detector is optimised for English. Results in other languages may be less reliable because the AI pattern signatures are calibrated on English-language training data.
Is it free?
Yes — the Groq and Gemini engine options are completely free with no account required. Check as many emails as you need.
The Bottom Line
AI-generated email is the new normal. Most of the unsolicited email in your inbox was written by a machine, and the gap between AI and human email quality is closing fast enough that the obvious grammatical tells are gone. The statistical tells are not. Use the Anonymiz AI Email Detector to check any email you are unsure about — free, instant, no account needed.
