Ezemail

A Google Chrome extension that digests and summarizes Gmail emails you received in a latest time period you specified. This tool helps you to grasp the important points from your most recent emails.

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Inspiration

With the flood of daily emails, it's easy to lose track of important deadlines and tasks buried within. We needed a solution that could help organize and prioritize emails efficiently, saving time and reducing the risk of missing crucial deadlines. The idea was to build an intuitive email tool that fetches emails, summarizes them, and highlights the most critical information, such as deadlines, while categorizing them based on priority.

What it does

Ezemail is a Chrome extension that:

  • Connects to your Gmail account using the Gmail API.
  • Fetches emails over a selected time range.
  • Uses the OpenAI API to summarize the content of the emails.
  • Categorizes emails based on urgency, importance, and subject.
  • Extracts and highlights deadlines or time-sensitive information.
  • Sends an email to the user with a summary of all emails within the selected period, including deadlines and categorized insights.

How we built it

  • Frontend: We built the Chrome extension UI using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We focused on creating a clean and easy-to-navigate interface for reading email summaries and deadlines.
  • Backend: The core logic integrates Gmail's API to retrieve emails and the OpenAI API to process and summarize the email content. After the summarization process is completed, the summary is emailed back to the user with organized insights.
  • Email Categorization: By analyzing the email content, we used the OpenAI API to determine the importance and urgency, automatically grouping emails into categories like "High Priority," "Reminders," "Tasks," etc.
  • Deadline Extraction: By scanning the email text, the tool pulls out dates and times and organizes them into a visual calendar.

Challenges we ran into

  • Authentication for Gmail and OpenAI APIs: The procedure involved many settings on the Google Cloud Platform, the Chrome extension, and our code. We visited some online resources but they did not work. This was quite challenging for us as we have never done that. It required deep understanding of the interaction between the user and the extension.
  • API Rate Limits: We encountered challenges with the Gmail and OpenAI API rate limits, which required us to batch requests and handle throttling.
  • Parsing complex emails: Some emails contain attachments, rich formatting, or embedded media, making it difficult to summarize the key points accurately.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully integrating two powerful APIs (Gmail and OpenAI) to create a seamless email management solution.
  • Creating a user-friendly extension that simplifies email workflows and makes important information (like deadlines) easily accessible.
  • Implementing deadline extraction and reminder features, helping users stay on top of important tasks and dates.
  • Automating the process to send users email summaries, eliminating the need to check emails frequently.

What we learned

  • Deepened our understanding of API integrations and handling their limitations.
  • Gained insights into how AI-driven summarization can vastly improve email management.
  • Learned the importance of UX design in productivity tools, making sure the tool is intuitive for users.

What's next for Ezemail

  • Smart Notifications: Implement push notifications for approaching deadlines or high-priority emails.
  • Advanced Email Filtering: Improve categorization by learning from the user's interaction with emails (e.g., marking something as high/low priority).
  • Attachment Summarization: Extend the summarization feature to attachments like PDFs and documents.
  • Multiple Email Accounts: Allow users to connect and manage multiple Gmail accounts from within the extension.

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