You do not have an email problem — you have a re-reading problem. Learn how to summarize emails with claude ai so every client email turns itself into a three-line summary in Notion, with the action and the deadline already pulled out.

The problem

A client sends a long email: a brief buried in paragraph four, a deadline tucked in the signature, a question you miss. You re-read it three times and still miss the ask, while the client waits.

The fix

Gmail catches the email, Make sends it to Claude, Claude writes a three-line summary with the action and the deadline, and Make saves it to Notion. Open Notion each morning and every email is already read for you — no code, no re-reading.

Prerequisites / Tools

You need a Make account, a Claude API key, a Gmail inbox, and a free Notion account, plus two dummy emails to test with — a long brief from a demo studio and an invoice question from a demo bakery.

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links, meaning StackScale may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Make: https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=stackscale&affiliateSource=devto
Claude: https://claude.com
Gmail: https://mail.google.com
Notion: https://www.notion.so

All mockups in the video are synthetic, created for this tutorial, with dummy data only — no real client email is shown.

Step 1: Gmail watches for client mail

In Make, add a Gmail module that watches for new mail, filtered to a label called Clients. Every client email becomes a trigger; the rest of your inbox stays untouched.

Step 2: Send the email to Claude

Add a Claude module and pass it the sender, subject, and body. Use this prompt, copied as-is:

Summarise this client email in three lines: what they want, what they need from me, and by when. Then list the action items and a priority of High, Medium, or Low.

Short prompt, strict output — summary, actions, priority.

Step 3: Map Claude's answer to Notion

Claude returns the summary, the actions, and the priority. Map each one into a Notion database called Email Summaries:

Sender -> Sender Subject -> Title Summary -> Summary Action -> Next action Priority -> Priority

One row per email, already read.

Step 4: Build the Email Summaries database

Give it a title for the subject, text fields for sender and summary, a select for priority, and a checkbox for replied. Then link the database onto a page, grouped by priority, so the urgent emails sit at the top.

Step 5: Test with two dummy emails

Send the demo studio brief and the demo bakery invoice question. Claude turns the brief into three lines — five-page redesign, two thousand four hundred dollars, reply by Friday — and flags the invoice question Medium. Both rows appear in Notion without you opening either email.

The result

Every client email summarised by Claude and waiting in Notion, action and deadline already pulled out. This is not the PDF summariser from the earlier video — that one reads documents, this one reads your inbox, and Claude is doing the reading. Different source, different model, different payoff: you stop re-reading emails instead of re-reading files.

Watch the full 3-minute tutorial above, and tell us in the comments: how many client emails land in your inbox each day?