Fixing email with local LLMs
I think email is garbage.
Most of the emails are weaponized to steal my attention. They embed emojis in the title, they have fancy HTML styling, and they never get to the point. Some small minority of emails do need my attention, but they are frequently lost in the noise. And, let's face it, even useful emails are a mess of quotes and signatures.
What if I could get a short, plain text summary of every email? Using the power of local LLMs and a simple extension for Thunderbird, I now can.
Every email I now get is summarized and streamed to me like this, and it genuinely makes my life better:
The best thing about using Ollama is that there is no concern about private information being sent to an external party.
My daily routine is now to browse a Slack channel, tick each summary as I view it, and then jump into my email client to review those few emails that genuinely need my attention. It is the difference between spending 5 minutes reviewing all my emails and, if I'm being honest, often not looking at email at all.
The killer feature of LLMs is not their ability to generate, but their ability to summarize and comprehend.
You can grab a copy of this extension yourself from https://github.com/mcasperson/ThunderbirdOllama.