Email: the channel with the most volume and the fewest surprises
Nova reads along with your business mailbox, recognises what a message is about and answers it in your tone. There are no per-message costs and no limit on how long a conversation stays open — which makes email the cheapest channel to start with. During the shadow week it only prepares drafts; it starts sending on its own once you see that it is right.
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What characterises email as a channel
| Aspect | How it works |
|---|---|
| Cost per message | None — you only pay your existing mail hosting |
| Time window | Unlimited; a thread can stay open for weeks |
| AI disclosure | Fixed line at the bottom of every reply |
| Biggest risk | Deliverability — replies that get stuck in spam filters |
| Time to go live | About 4 weeks, including the shadow week |
Where it goes wrong in practice
The pitfall with email is not the content but the delivery. As soon as more volume leaves your domain, receiving mail servers look harder at whether that domain is allowed to send. If SPF, DKIM and DMARC are not set up correctly, good replies end up in the spam folder — and you only find out when a customer calls to say they never heard back. We check those settings before the shadow week, not after. For clarity: SPF, DKIM and DMARC are three records in your domain DNS that together prove a message genuinely comes from you. If they are missing or half-configured, the receiving server judges your domain more harshly — regardless of how good the reply itself is.
When this is not the right channel
If your business handles nearly all customer contact via WhatsApp or phone, automating email yields little — you would be automating the channel with the least volume. Look first at where most messages actually arrive; that is almost never where you assume, and it is visible in your own mailbox and call log.
What we need from you
This genuinely differs per channel, so it sits here rather than in a generic checklist:
- Access to the mailbox Nova will answer, and clarity on which addresses are in scope and which are not.
- Your domain DNS settings, so we can verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC before volume starts leaving.
- An archive of roughly 90 days of sent mail, because that is what Nova learns your tone from — not a style guide.
How this channel goes live
The sequence is the same for every channel: intake call, analysis of your existing communication from the past 90 days, and a shadow week in which Nova prepares answers but sends nothing. That week is not a formality — it is the moment where it becomes visible which work it genuinely handles on this channel.
What applies legally once an AI communicates on your behalf — the transparency obligation and the article 22 GDPR boundary — is set out in the AI Act for SMEs and AI and the GDPR for SMEs.