Email summariser

What it gives you

The split between the summary and the replies is deliberate: you want to understand in your language and answer in theirs. It is also why the reply options are short — they are there to pick a direction, not to be sent as they are.

• A summary of two sentences at most, in the language you are reading this page in.
• The one concrete next step, if there is one — and nothing where there is not.
• Up to three very short reply options, written in the language of the message itself.
• Up to 6,000 characters of input, which covers a long thread if you paste the last few messages.

What a summary is good for, and what it is not

It is good for triage. A thread you were copied into, a message in a language you read slowly, a forwarded chain where the actual question is in the middle — in all of those, two sentences tell you whether this is today’s problem and who is waiting on whom.

It is not good as a substitute for reading something that matters. A summary drops nuance by design, and a model can be confidently wrong about who promised what. Before you act on a commitment, a figure or a deadline, read the sentence it came from. Mailbind shows the original next to the summary rather than replacing it, for that reason.

Pasting a thread, sensibly

1. 1Paste the most recent messages rather than the whole chain: the tail is where the question is.
2. 2Keep the quoted text if it carries the original request; drop the signatures and the disclaimers.
3. 3Leave the names in. The summary is more useful when it can say who is waiting on whom.
4. 4Do not paste anything you would not send to a third party — the text goes to our AI provider to be summarised.

Nothing is stored by Mailbind: not the paste, not the summary, not in a log. There is a budget of ten summaries an hour from one place, because each costs money.

Why two sentences and not five

A summary that is half the length of the original has not saved you anything; it has given you a second thing to read. The limit is the feature, and it forces the model to decide what the message is actually about rather than restating it in order.

The next step is separate for the same reason. Most long threads contain exactly one thing somebody has to do, and it is usually not in the last message — it is three messages back, in a sentence that ended with a question mark. Pulling it out is more useful than any amount of summary.

The version that does not need pasting

In Mailbind the summary is already at the top of the message when you open it, with the next step and the suggested replies underneath, and it works on the real thread rather than on what you remembered to copy. Needs-reply triage then does the same job across every mailbox at once: it marks the messages where somebody is still owed an answer, which is the queue a full inbox actually has.

That is on the Pro and Team plans, and it can be switched off for the whole account or for a single mailbox — which is the setting for a client whose mail must not leave their provider.

Common questions

Keep reading

• All tools
• Reply generator
• Email translator
• AI email assistant
• Run a shared support inbox
• Help: AI and privacy