Automatic email categorization is an important application of text classification. We study the automatic reply of email business messages in Brazilian Portuguese. We present a novel corpus containing messages from a real application, and baseline categorization experiments using Naive Bayes and support Vector Machines. We then discuss the effect of lemmatization and the role of part-of-speech tagging filtering on precision and recall. Support Vector Machines classification coupled with nonlemmatized selection of verbs, nouns and adjectives was the best approach, with 87.3% maximum accuracy. Straightforward lemmatization in Portuguese led to the lowest classification results in the group, with 85.3% and 81.7% precision in SVM and Naive Bayes respectively. Thus, while lemmatization reduced precision and recall, part-of-speech filtering improved overall results.