email-summary

What This Skill Does

The email-summary skill is a robust productivity tool designed to streamline your communication workflow. It acts as an intelligent assistant that interfaces directly with your Gmail inbox to retrieve and synthesize your recent, unread messages. Instead of wading through endless threads, this skill processes the content for you, extracting the most critical information. For every email retrieved, the skill provides a clear "From" header, the subject line, a concise 2-3 sentence summary of the body content, and a recommended action (such as reply, archive, or follow-up). By automating the initial review phase of your inbox, you can save significant time and ensure that important communication never slips through the cracks.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, follow these steps:

1. Ensure you have the OpenClaw agent installed.
2. Execute the installation command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/bbdyno/email-summary.
3. Verify that your system has Python 3 installed, as the skill relies on a backend helper script.
4. Configure the GMAIL_CREDENTIALS_PATH environment variable to point to your valid Google Cloud project credentials JSON file.
5. Run the setup instructions located in the skill's README.md to ensure all necessary Python dependencies are satisfied.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for professionals managing high-volume inboxes, developers triaging notification emails, or any user looking to reduce "email anxiety." Use it when you are starting your morning to get a "too long; didn't read" overview of the night's activity, or when you are transitioning between tasks and want to quickly catch up on urgent communications without fully opening your email client. It is particularly effective for filtering out noise and focusing on actionable items.

Example Prompts

1. "I'm heading into a meeting; can you give me a summary of my latest emails so I know if anything needs urgent attention?"
2. "Summarize the last 20 unread emails in my inbox, please."
3. "Hey, check my inbox and let me know if there are any pending action items from my recent threads."

Tips & Limitations

To get the most out of this skill, ensure your Gmail API permissions are correctly scoped to read-only if you wish to maintain high security. Note that the skill currently processes unread emails by default; archived or already-read mail will be ignored unless specified. If you have a very large number of emails, using the --count argument is recommended to prevent output clutter. Please keep in mind that the accuracy of the summary depends on the complexity of the email body; very short or highly technical emails may require manual review.