Daily

Get an evening summary of your Outlook mail

Each evening one email tells you what came in today and what needs an answer.

Runs: Daily
Apps: Outlook
AI: Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access: read

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every day at 6pm, summarise the emails I received in Outlook today, list the ones that need a reply first, and email me the digest.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A founder spends the day in meetings and comes back at 6 pm to a hundred new emails. Reading them all would take an hour, skipping them risks missing a customer's request or a contract question, and doing a quick scan means that half of what matters is overlooked anyway. By the time she finds the important message, the person who sent it has been waiting since lunch.

Each evening, the day's messages are collected from Outlook and ClickRuntime's built-in AI reads them and writes one short summary: what needs a reply, what is just information, who wrote, and any deadlines mentioned. The digest is emailed to you, so the first thing you read tells you where to focus.

It is useful for executives, consultants and anyone whose days are spent in meetings.

What you get out of it

Important mail is surfaced first
The summary leads with what needs a reply, so a client question that came in at 2 pm is the first thing you see at 6 pm. It stops urgent messages from disappearing among routine ones.
Inbox review takes minutes instead of an hour
A page of summary replaces a hundred separate messages. You open only the ones that need action, and you skip the rest knowing they were covered. That saves a large part of the evening that would otherwise go to scrolling and second-guessing.
Deadlines are not buried in threads
When a message mentions that something is due on Friday, the summary pulls it out. That keeps commitments from hiding in the middle of long messages. Seeing a date written out in a summary is far more reliable than hoping to notice it while skimming.
You can switch off at a sensible hour
Knowing that nothing important is hiding in your inbox makes it easier to stop checking mail in the evening. The summary gives you confidence that you have not missed anything.
A record of the day's correspondence
Each summary documents who wrote and what was asked. If you need to recall when a request arrived, the digest is easy to search. That helps when a dispute comes up about whether you were told about something and when.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every evening, ClickRuntime gathers the emails that reached your Outlook inbox today.
AI reads the senders, subjects and opening lines and sums up the day in five lines.
It then lists the messages that need an answer.
You get the summary in one email, with today's email count in the subject.

Before it runs live

Connect Outlook

What you get

RunsDaily

Get an evening summary of your Outlook mailtoday, 9:00Succeeded

Email · Your inbox today (38 emails)Mostly invoices and a contract thread with Northwind. Needs an answer: Acme asked to move Thursday's review.

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Outlook steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

daily_ai_inbox_summary.pyexample

from datetime import datetime, timezone
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, ai, notify

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    today = datetime.now(timezone.utc).strftime("%Y-%m-%dT00:00:00Z")
    msgs = http.get("https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages",
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.connection('microsoft', 'work')}"},
        params={"$filter": f"receivedDateTime ge {today}", "$select": "subject,from,bodyPreview", "$top": 100}).json()["value"]
    if not msgs:
        return {"messages": 0}
    text = "\n".join(f"- {m['from']['emailAddress']['name']}: {m['subject']} – {m['bodyPreview'][:200]}" for m in msgs)
    summary = ai.generate(text, system="Summarise today's email in 5 lines, then list the messages that need an answer.", max_output_tokens=400).text
    notify.email_me(f"Your inbox today ({len(msgs)} emails)", summary)
    return {"messages": len(msgs)}

FAQ

Common questions

What time does it arrive?

At the time you choose, for example 6 pm on weekdays. The messages from that calendar day up to the moment of the run are included, so pick a time after most of your mail has come in.

Does the AI read every message?

It reads the day's messages in your inbox and groups them. Newsletters and notifications may be mentioned briefly or collapsed into one line. Since AI summaries can miss detail, open anything that looks important. That keeps sensitive threads out of the summary.

Can I exclude folders or senders?

Yes. You can limit the summary to the inbox, skip certain senders or categories, or exclude messages marked private. Anything you leave out is not read by the AI and does not appear in the digest.

What permissions does it need?

read. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

Yes. It uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so you don't need an OpenAI or Anthropic key. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it runs (daily). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

On a scheduleAI