TL;DR email digester

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Before you read this, try it out

Forward 2-3 newsletter emails to tldr@digester.email and in 5-10 minutes you should get a summary of the emails sent back to you. A newsletter email is a longer email that you would rather just read a simple summary of.

Inspiration

We can all agree that while the instantaneous, globe spanning properties of email are awesome, the way it is used in practice can be a real drag on productivity and peace of mind.

I get a lot of emails from people and organizations that I'm interested in, but don't need to hear from them as often as they send me emails. What if there was a way to control how often people sent you emails and when they showed up in your inbox. It would change email from push (where anybody can send you anything at any time) to pull (where you get the information you want when you want it).

What it does

TL;DR Email Digester pre-filters your email so newsletters and other designated emails get set aside into a special folder to be summarized by AI later, on your timetable. You can set as many digesters as you want with different frequencies and delivery schedules. It can also help you surface emails that you don't want to get anymore and easily unsubscribe to them.

How I built it

The site is built on Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku. I'm using a webhook to get notified of incoming mail from Nylas, checking it against a DB and using the Nylas API to move it into a special folder to be digested later. I'm running a background job on Rails to check to see when to send the emails out and summarizing them w/ AI21 Studio's Summary API: https://www.ai21.com/studio

Challenges I ran into

The Summary API can take either a URL or text as an input. It works better when summarizing from HTML as there is more context, but I couldn't get it to summarize from my hosted emails, so I had to strip out the HTML from the emails and just send it text. AI is pretty good at summarizing information, so if I could find another API or get AI21 to recognize the HTML version of the emails, it would make the summaries even better.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I could see in my head how it could all fit together, but then when I sent my first email that got summarized and emailed back to me, it was pretty awesome! It's been a joy to use the Nylas API. It's well documented, easy to use and just works well.

What I learned

There are a lot of variables and tweaks that go into getting a reliable response from an AI API. Usable AI is still pretty new and it takes quite a bit of tweaking what you put in to get reliable output. Garbage in, garbage out. When I first parsed the HTML, I just stripped out all the HTML tags, but then I realized that the paragraph breaks actually had information that I was losing, so I ended up using the Loofah gem to preserve the paragraph information from the HTML emails.

What's next for TL;DR email digester

I'm launching a private beta to better figure out how these tools can help people spend less time in their email and enjoy it more. Using AI to highlight dates in emails will be really helpful and add an option for people to directly add events to their calendar from inside an email.

If you'd like to give me feedback or sign up for the private beta, click on the link below to fill out the form: https://forms.gle/FZKhuERKTsngBRZy5