Email Summarization

MailFellow uses AI to generate short, actionable summaries of incoming emails and entire conversation threads. Summaries let your team understand the gist of an email without reading the full body.

Single Email Summarization

When a new email arrives, MailFellow generates a 1-2 sentence summary that captures the key point. The summary is displayed as the email snippet in your chat platform notification.

Example

Original email (250 words about a billing dispute):

Summary: Customer requesting a refund for double charge on their March invoice.
They attached a screenshot of the duplicate transaction.

The summary is written in the same language as the email. A German email gets a German summary, a Japanese email gets a Japanese summary.

Thread Summarization

For email threads with multiple messages, MailFellow can summarize the entire conversation into 2-3 sentences that capture:

• What was discussed
• What was decided
• What action is still needed

Thread summarization uses up to 6,000 characters across all messages in the thread, focusing on the most recent exchanges.

Example

Thread summary (5 messages): Customer reported login issues on Monday.
Support identified a password reset bug and deployed a fix on Tuesday.
Customer confirmed the issue is resolved.

Where Summaries Appear

• Chat notification:the snippet shown in the email card/embed on your platform
• Thread view:thread summaries may appear as pinned context in the thread
• Dashboard:email list shows summaries for quick scanning

The full email body is always available by clicking "View in Browser" or reading the thread replies.

How It Works

1. MailFellow extracts the plain text body (up to 4,000 characters for single emails, 6,000 for threads)
2. Sends the text to your configured AI provider with a summarization prompt
3. The AI returns a concise summary in the email's original language
4. The result is cached for 5 minutes (keyed by the first 200 characters) to avoid duplicate calls

Cost Efficiency

Summarization and categorization happen in a single API call, so you are not charged twice. Each incoming email uses approximately one API call. Cached results are reused for 5 minutes.

Costs are approximate and depend on email length. Short emails cost less.

Setup

Summarization is enabled automatically when you set up AI. No additional configuration is needed.