Pangram says the contents of your emails aren’t stored after being assessed and won’t be used to train models designed to look for AI text. There’s still a level of trust here, but you can quickly remove the Pangram plug-in from your Gmail at any point.
After you connect your Gmail account, Pangram gets to work. It’ll scan your 100 most recent email threads and then any new messages from then on—you can’t get it to check all of the emails you’ve ever received. As far as I can tell, email scanning doesn’t count against your scan credit limit for the month, so you’re covered no matter how busy your inbox is.
After scanning, the Gmail Integration part of your Pangram dashboard changes. You can see at a glance how many of your emails are suspected to be AI, how many are most probably human, and how many have been flagged as a mix between the two. Inside Gmail, these three categories can be applied as labels, though this is optional. (If you decide to remove Pangram from your inbox later, any labels it’s created will stick around, but you can delete these manually.)
You can also choose to send incoming AI-written emails straight to the archive or to spam if you want, which is handy for keeping AI content away from your eyeballs. You can also choose to exclude specific domains, Gmail labels, subject keywords, and senders from Pangram’s scans, if you don’t want emails from your boss or mom scrutinized.
Scanning My Inbox With Pangram
So the moment of truth: Out of the 108 threads that Pangram scanned, eight of them were labeled as AI, 37 got the human label, and the remainder were marked as mixed. It’s a little dispiriting to discover that way more than half of my incoming messages are probably AI-written, with press releases the most common culprits.