Email Summaries
A long email isn't always worth a full read. Email summaries are designed to let MailPrism's AI condense a single message into a short, plain-language summary so you can grasp the gist fast.
The summary engine exists behind the scenes, but there is no button or menu in the app today to generate or display a per-email summary on demand. This page describes how summaries are built and cached; the in-app view that surfaces them is still rolling out. To get the gist of an email now, open it from the inbox.
Summaries use AI, so they only run after you've turned on AI data processing. Without consent, MailPrism returns a prompt to enable it in Settings → Privacy instead of generating a summary. See AI privacy & consent.
How a summary is created
When a summary is requested for an email, MailPrism:
- Checks whether a summary already exists for that email — if so, the cached version is returned instantly (no new AI call).
- Confirms your AI processing consent is on. If it isn't, you're asked to enable AI in Settings → Privacy first.
- Sends the email's content to an AI provider to generate the summary.
- Stores the result so future requests are served from the cache.
Caching
Each summary is generated once per email and then saved.
- The first request runs the AI and stores the result.
- Every later request for the same email returns the cached summary — fast and at no additional AI cost.
This keeps summaries quick to reopen and avoids re-running the AI on the same message.
What gets sent for analysis
To produce the summary, the email's text is sent to an AI provider (the same providers used elsewhere in MailPrism — see AI privacy & consent). Very long emails are truncated before analysis, so an extremely long message may be summarized from its earlier portion.
Summaries run through whichever AI setup you use — MailPrism's managed AI, or your own provider if you've set up BYOK.
→ Related: Reading an email · AI, Explained