How do you summarise a long email thread?

What should a good email thread summary contain

A good summary contains the decisions made, the questions still open, the owner of each next step and what the latest message wants from you. Leave out pleasantries and repeated quotes, and if the thread changed direction, say so in one line, such as the scope narrowing after the second call.

• Decisions: what both sides agreed, with the date it was agreed.
• Open questions: what is still unanswered, and who was asked.
• Owners: who said they would do what, on either side.
• The ask: what the most recent message needs from you, and by when.

How do you catch up on an email thread you joined late

Catch up by reading the first and last messages yourself, then using a summary for everything in between. The first message tells you why the conversation started; the last tells you where it stands; the middle is where decisions drift.

Ask who the people on the thread are if you do not know them. In a long chain, the buyer's colleague and the buyer's supplier can sound alike, and replying to the wrong one is easy.

How do you summarise an email thread with AI

Ask an assistant to read the thread and return decisions, open questions and owners, rather than asking for a general summary. In Pebbles Ai, the assistants can search, read and work through threads in a connected Gmail or Outlook inbox, and reading is never an approval action.

Name the thread by sender, subject or company, and say what you need the summary for, such as tomorrow's call, so the assistant weights the right details. Ask it to point to the message behind each decision or figure: the summary is a reading aid, and the email remains the record.

What do you do with the summary next

Use the summary to decide the next reply, then draft it from the same thread while the context is fresh. Ask the assistant for a reply that answers the open questions it found, or open the thread in Smartbox and use Write with AI.

Drafts wait in your mailbox, and a send by the assistant follows your execution mode. For a live deal, the decisions and next steps can go onto the CRM record as a note or task, each write following the same mode.

When should you not rely on an AI email summary

Do not rely on a summary alone for contract terms, prices, legal wording or anything you will be held to. Read those lines in the original message.

Take care with threads that pass documents back and forth, too. A decision recorded only in an attached file needs checking in the file itself before you act on it.