GuideUpdated October 23, 2026
Summarize your inbox every morning
There are two ways to get a daily view of deadlines, open replies and payment problems. You can ask an assistant to summarize individual long threads, or you can use an overview that answers the same questions about your whole inbox every morning. Copilot in Outlook and Gemini in Gmail summarize threads when you ask them to. Command Mail's morning brief is a fixed list of cases that shows what is new since you last read it.[1][3][4]
Command Mail is our product. This guide covers what a useful morning brief contains, how to get one in each of the three tools, and where the limits are. If you want Codex to fetch the brief at a set time, see Email triage with Codex.[5]
01What belongs in a morning brief?
A morning brief is useful when it names the cases that need action today and leaves out newsletters. Retelling every new email does not help much: twenty paragraphs about promotions and shipping notices take longer than looking at the inbox yourself.
Five questions cover most mornings. What is waiting for my decision? Which deadline is coming up? Who is waiting for my reply? Who reports a payment problem? Which of my own emails got no answer although I meant to follow up? A sixth question is often missing: did the overview actually see everything, or did a fetch fail?
The brief also needs to know about yesterday. If the same items show up every morning, the new ones become hard to spot. A good brief separates new, changed and already known items.
02Copilot and Gemini: summaries on request
Copilot in Outlook summarizes a thread when you open the conversation and select Summary by Copilot or Summarize at the top. The summary appears above the email and can include numbered citations that jump to the individual messages. In new Outlook and Outlook on the web, Copilot can also summarize attached PDF, Word and PowerPoint files.[3]
In Gmail you open Gemini with Ask Gemini at the top right. According to Gmail Help, Gemini condenses long threads into bullet points, drafts emails, finds details such as flight times and, when asked and after you explicitly confirm, deletes emails or adds labels. It requires an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan.[4]
Both are good at making a long thread quick to understand, and both work inside your existing inbox. Microsoft's help article, however, describes one thread per request. With Gemini you write the question yourself, for example about deadlines this week. Gmail Help does not say how complete such an answer is across many emails, and neither article describes a daily overview with fixed sections and a comparison with the previous day.[3][4]
Plans and prices for both assistants change often. Check the current Microsoft 365, Google One and Google Workspace pages before you buy.
03The morning brief in Command Mail
Command Mail builds its morning brief from seven sections: decisions, review payments, deadlines, open replies, follow-ups, failures and coverage. That is how the app's code defines it (morning-brief.ts). You open it in the sidebar under Morning brief.[1]
What each section contains:
- Decisions: agent drafts to review, meaning pending ones, already approved ones and ones with an uncertain send status, plus open suggestions from your agent, such as a rule or a bulk archive.
- Review payments: emails that point to a payment problem, such as a dunning notice, a payment reminder or "overdue", linked to the original email. A payment confirmation is not treated as an open balance.[1]
- Deadlines: emails in which a sentence states a deadline ("due by", "deadline", or German phrases such as "bis zum" and "fällig") together with a date in a recognized form:
2026-10-30,30.10.2026or30.10.. Written-out month names often fail at the moment, and English formats such as "October 30" are not recognized. The brief includes deadlines up to 14 days ahead; missed ones stay visible. - Open replies: conversations whose latest message came from someone else and contains a question, a request or an appointment, or that is recognized as a personal conversation, for example because you have written to the sender before. Bulk mail and no-reply senders do not count.
- Follow-ups: your own emails whose follow-up date is due and that have no answer yet.
- Failures: actions that failed in the last 48 hours.
- Coverage: whether the checks for your sources ran completely or parts are missing.
Every item is marked new, changed or unchanged compared with the brief you last confirmed with Mark as read. The Markdown version folds unchanged items into one line. Anything that disappeared since then is listed under resolved items. The brief never marks payments as resolved on its own: a dunning notice leaving the inbox does not prove that anyone paid.
By default the page shows what arrived since yesterday and what is due by tomorrow; one button widens it to the week or to everything. Decisions, payments, open replies and coverage gaps always show, and so do missed deadlines (brief-range.ts).[1]
04Prerequisites
You need a Command Mail account and at least one address forwarded to your private intake address. The free plan is enough: one mailbox, the last 90 days, reading, search, sorting, the morning brief and drafts, but no sending.[2] To read the brief in a chat, you also need an agent that can connect to MCP servers with OAuth, such as Claude, ChatGPT or Codex.
After setting up forwarding, let a day of email arrive so the first brief has something to show. Until a check of your sources is reported, the coverage section says so.
05Set it up step by step
- Open Morning brief in the sidebar. The first brief marks everything as new.
- Go through the items, then select Mark as read. From then on, the next brief highlights only what is new or changed.
- If you would rather read the brief in a chat, connect an agent to
https://commandmail.app/mcpand grant onlymail:read. Themorning_brieftool returns the brief as JSON or Markdown and changes nothing;acknowledge_briefconfirms it, like the button in the app.[1]
A short instruction to the agent is enough:
Fetch morning_brief with timeZone "Europe/London" and format "markdown".
Summarize in English only items marked "Neu" or "Geändert", ordered by due date.
Then confirm the brief with acknowledge_brief and its briefId.
The Markdown is in German: "Neu" means new, "Geändert" means changed.Set the time zone, otherwise dates appear in UTC. The brief over MCP is currently produced in German, whatever the time zone. If the state of the brief changed between fetching and confirming, for example through a new case or an edited draft, Command Mail refuses a new confirmation as stale and the agent fetches the brief again. If the agent repeats an already saved confirmation of the same ID within an hour, Command Mail accepts it without comparing it with the current brief ID.
06Did it work?
The next morning, the counts line at the top of the brief should list new, changed, resolved and unchanged items separately and refer to the brief you last marked as read. If it still says this is the first brief and everything is new, the confirmation was not saved.[1]
Also check one item against the original email. Under deadlines, an excerpt from the detected deadline passage is quoted, so you can see right away whether the detected date is correct.
07What the brief misses
The morning brief is built from fixed text rules, without a language model (mail-signals.ts). That makes it traceable and free to run, but it only understands what the text says. A deadline that appears only inside a PDF attachment or an image is not found, and neither is one without a signal word or with a date in another form, such as "next Friday" or "October 30". For English-language mail this limit matters most.
For deadlines, payment problems and open replies it only scans open conversations in the inbox, meaning not archived, not deleted and not spam, and of those at most the newest 400. Drafts, suggestions, follow-ups, failures and coverage come from separate queries. It takes the first deadline it finds in each email, and the deadlines section holds at most eight. When a section is cut off like this, the brief does not mark missing items in it as resolved.
Forwarded emails are copies. Anything you archive only in Gmail or Outlook stays open in Command Mail and keeps appearing. On the free plan the brief scans only the mailbox set for Free and the last 90 days; agent drafts under decisions are queried separately and are not limited this way.[2]
Finally, the brief is not sent anywhere. Telegram and push exist in the code but are explicitly switched off. You have to open it, or have an agent fetch it.
08Troubleshooting
A deadline is missing. If it only appears in an attachment or has no date in the text, the brief does not detect it. Set your own reminder for such emails, for example in your calendar. Follow-ups in Command Mail only work for conversations where you wrote and are waiting for an answer.
A finished email keeps showing up. Archive it in Command Mail. Anything you handle only in the original mailbox is invisible to Command Mail.
The agent reports that the confirmation was refused. The state changed between fetching and confirming, for example through a new case or an edited draft. The agent fetches the brief again and confirms that state.[1]
The times are wrong. The agent did not pass a time zone; without one, Command Mail uses UTC.
09Which approach fits you?
| Situation | Approach |
|---|---|
| You want to understand a long Outlook thread | Summary by Copilot in Outlook |
| You want to ask questions about your Gmail and get summaries | Ask Gemini in Gmail |
| You want the same sections every morning across several addresses | Morning brief in Command Mail |
| You want your agent to report to you every morning | morning_brief over MCP, scheduled in your agent |
These approaches can be combined. If you use Outlook with Copilot, you can also forward your address to Command Mail and read the brief there while still writing replies in Outlook.
10Next steps
Once the brief is running, move newsletters out of the inbox with rules so open replies do not get buried. The guide Clean up your inbox with AI shows how the agent suggests changes before it sorts anything.
Start Command Mail for free, forward one address and read your first brief tomorrow morning.
11Sources and date
As of 2026-10-23. The Microsoft and Google help articles and Command Mail's docs and plan details were retrieved on that day.[1][2][3][4] Statements about sections, deadlines, coverage, confirmation and delivery are based on the Command Mail code at commit d11e2ae (morning-brief.ts, mail-insight.ts, mail-signals.ts, brief-range.ts, mcp.ts).
Frequently asked questions
Can Copilot summarize my whole Outlook inbox every morning?
Microsoft's help article on summarizing describes one email thread at a time: you open the conversation and select Summary by Copilot. A daily overview across all conversations, built automatically, is not described in that article. We did not check other Copilot features for this on 2026-10-23.
Do I need an AI agent for the Command Mail morning brief?
No. The morning brief is in the app under Morning brief and is built from fixed text rules, without a language model. An agent can also fetch it with the morning_brief tool, for example in a scheduled task.
Does Command Mail send me the brief by email, Telegram or push?
No. The brief is not sent anywhere; Telegram and push are explicitly disabled in the code. You open it in the app, or your agent fetches it and puts it wherever it usually reports to you.
Does the morning brief catch every invoice?
No. Review payments lists only emails that point to a payment problem, such as a dunning notice, a payment reminder or the word overdue. Ordinary invoices appear in the daily overview, which an agent fetches with daily_overview. Both rely on words in the text and do not replace checking your account with the provider.
Is the morning brief included in the free plan?
Yes. According to the plan details on 2026-10-23, Free includes one mailbox, the last 90 days, reading, search, sorting, the morning brief and drafts. The brief then only covers what the plan shows.