We Asked Our AI Assistant to Set Up Our Business Email

Every new site needs a real contact address. We wanted two, help@ and info@assistantcompass.com, that land in the Gmail we already check and let us reply as them. Free, if possible. So we handed the whole errand to our AI assistant and watched what happened.

Step 1: The registrar dead end

Our domain is at GoDaddy. The assistant checked first and found no free email forwarding there, only paid Microsoft 365 mailboxes. It came back with that instead of buying one.

Step 2: Receiving mail, done with DNS

It set up free forwarding through Forward Email. No account, just two MX records and one line of text in our DNS. When we later swapped one address for another, that was a one-line edit.

Step 3: Sending is the hard half

Forwarding gets mail in. Replying as help@ needs an outgoing mail server (SMTP), and most free forwarders don't include one.

Step 4: The robot checks

Two free services stopped the assistant cold. One used a Cloudflare check that failed three times; the other used a picture captcha it couldn't read. This is where today's agents still need a person, and it's worth knowing before you hand one an errand.

Step 5: Brevo's free plan worked

The assistant made a free Brevo account, added three DNS records to prove we own the domain, verified both addresses, created a sending key, and connected it to Gmail's "Send mail as". Both addresses now send and receive.

Where a human stepped in

• Confirming the signup email
• Two text-message codes (the first one was rejected, so we asked for a fresh one)
• Choosing which postal address goes on the account. We used our business mailbox, not a home address, since it can appear in email footers.

What it asked before acting

No money was spent. Every paid option came back to us for a yes first, which is exactly the behaviour our Asks first check looks for.