Tackling email, without interrupting your flow

We all get a lot of email, texts, IMs, etc etc. However, what sets email apart from most of these is that it’s long. While IMs and texts might be a sentence or two, emails tend to be longer and more detailed.

This originally started as a way to make driving safer. Obviously reading an email in the car is a bad idea - but what if it could be as easy as texting in CarPlay? Well the bad news is, there are some Shortcuts inconsistencies between iPhones and Macs so this isn’t possible. Of course I didn’t know this until I started building and testing so here we are lol

What I’ve created is a shortcut that takes in mail (from mail.app) and then parses the sender, subject and body of the email - as you can seen below.

The entire prompt is pretty simple, 2 lines + a short system prompt. For this I’m happy using a small 3B model (hey, 3B works for Apple) so it’s a good balance between speed and quality.

To keep things simple, I limit to the newest 5 emails. If I have more than 5 emails, I should probably pause to read/triage them. Each email gets its own 1 sentence summary and keeps it unread in my inbox. This assures that you don’t just “trust” a random LLM summary and actually check out the email itself. This way, I can quickly tell if an email is important and requires immediate attention or not. Best of all, it does it all without needing to show me the mail app which could be a distraction all by itself.

Below is an example of it at work when I receive an email about some backordered shoes... less time sensitive but still nice to know!

Once again, having this run locally on Private LLM (https://privatellm.app/en) means I can still gain the insights and benefits of a quick summary BUT without sending all my email to someone else to read. This is one of those shortcuts that doesn’t save 15 minutes or writing but can save 2 minutes x 10 times per day. I hope you find it as useful as I do!

Input: email

Output: 1 sentence summary