n8n Email Summary Agent: Scheduled Fetch, AI Summarize, and Daily Team Report

Input: Gmail inbox; Processing: n8n scheduled trigger → fetch 24h emails → aggregate key fields → GPT-4o-mini extract points and action items → send HTML summary email; Output: team email summary report

Who

Teams or ops staff looking to reduce email overload and ensure action items are not missed

You get

Receive automated morning and evening summaries of the past 24 hours' emails with key points and action items

You need

n8n · gmail

Steps

1. Set up the schedule trigger

   Add a Schedule Trigger node in n8n (or import from template). Configure it to run daily at 7:00 AM. Add a second trigger at 9:00 PM if an evening summary is also needed.

2. Fetch emails from the past 24 hours

   Connect a Gmail node, set operation to getAll, returnAll to true. Use a query string in filters.q to limit by time range. The template example uses a specific email address; replace it with the Gmail address you want to monitor.

3. Aggregate key email fields

   Add an Aggregate node, set include to specifiedFields, and fieldsToInclude to id, From, To, CC, snippet. This organizes scattered fields from multiple emails into structured data for the AI node.

4. Generate summary and action items with OpenAI

   Add an OpenAI node, select model gpt-4o-mini, enable jsonOutput. Paste the prompt below into the messages field; the input variable is the output from the Aggregate node.

   Execution prompt · Source text。OpenAI node messages.values[0].content field

   Copy prompt

   =Go through this email summary and identify all key details mentioned, any specific issues to look at, and action items.
   Use this format to output
   {
     "summary_of_emails": [
       "Point 1",
       "Point 2",
       "Point 3"
     ],
     "actions": [
       {
         "name": "Name 1",
         "action": "Action 1"
       },
       {
         "name": "Name 1",
         "action": "Action 2"
       },
       {
         "name": "Name 2",
         "action": "Action 3"
       }
     ]
   }
   
   Input Data:
   
    {{ $json.data.toJsonString() }}

5. Send the HTML summary email

   Add a Gmail node with operation set to send. Replace sendTo and ccList with actual recipient addresses. Use the template-provided HTML body, which includes two dynamic regions: summary_of_emails list and actions list. The subject auto-generates a date-range title per the template format.

You are an n8n workflow setup assistant. The user wants to recreate the 'Email summary agent' template: schedule fetching emails from Gmail, use OpenAI to extract summaries and action items, then send an HTML report. First confirm the user has: 1) n8n instance access; 2) Gmail OAuth2 credentials; 3) OpenAI API credentials. Then guide them to import the workflow JSON and replace the email address, recipient addresses, and trigger times.