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🏫 Auto-Summarizing Your Inbox with AI
Streamline your inbox with AI! Get daily email summaries in Slack, Notion, or email—fast, efficient, and automated.
📌 Quick Context:
Drowning in email? Streamline your mornings with an AI-powered email digest that summarizes your unread messages—automatically. Save time, increase focus, and keep you informed without the inbox overload.
How to Do It in 3 Steps:
Step 1: Connect Gmail to Zapier
Create a new Zap:
Trigger: Choose Gmail → New Unread Email in Inbox
Set filters to catch only unread emails from the past 24 hours
Optional: Filter by label (e.g., “Important” or “Team”) to reduce noise
🛑 Pro Tip: Use Gmail filters to auto-label important emails—this makes your digest smarter.
Step 2: Send Email Content to ChatGPT for Summarization
Add an Action Step: Use OpenAI’s “ChatGPT” or “Chat Completions” action
Prompt example:
Summarize the following emails into a concise daily digest with key points and senders listed:
{{Email Body Plain}}
Use a markdown-friendly output if sending to Slack or Notion
💡 Common Mistake: Don’t just summarize subject lines—include the plain text body for richer context.
Step 3: Deliver the Summary Where You Want It
Choose a delivery method:
Email: Send a daily digest back to yourself
Slack: Post to a “#daily-digest” channel
Notion or Google Docs: Append to a rolling summary doc
🔁 Iteration Tip: Improve summarization by fine-tuning your prompt with tone preferences (e.g., “formal,” “bullet points,” or “action-focused”).
📝 Recommended Next Step:
Set up a test Zap with 1–3 emails and tweak your summarization prompt. Start small—evaluate clarity and usefulness, then scale to more inboxes or team accounts.
📦 Want to Go Deeper?
Add another filter to exclude marketing/newsletters
Use a “Digest by Zapier” step to batch multiple emails into one summary
Explore OpenAI’s function calling to extract structured tasks from emails (e.g., dates, to-dos)
Let your new AI assistant take the flood of emails off your plate—so you can focus on real work.
![]() | Nick WentzI've spent the last decade+ building and scaling technology companies—sometimes as a founder, other times leading marketing. These days, I advise early-stage startups and mentor aspiring founders. But my main focus is Forward Future, where we’re on a mission to make AI work for every human. |
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