Summarising an email chain

Two entries, two purposes

Task menu

• Summarize e-mail – takes the whole message including the chain. You do not have to select anything.
• Summarize selection – takes only the text you selected, and asks for a word count.

For the usual case – "what actually happened in this thread with thirty replies" – Summarize e-mail is the right entry.

What gets summarised

The entire message body, so the quoted earlier messages below it as well. That is exactly what the feature is for: it reads the history you would otherwise have to work through from the bottom up.

Conversely: anything not in that one message is not included. Replies that went out in another thread are unknown to the summary.

What to check

A summary decides what matters. In a chain with several participants, these are the things that typically go wrong:

• Who said what. A commitment from one side can be attributed to the other.
• What currently applies. An earlier proposal that was later withdrawn may appear as the outcome.
• Deadlines and figures. Verify them against the original passage.

As a way into a long chain the summary is very useful. As the basis for a decision it should not replace reading the message.

The result

The summary appears in a window you can copy from. It is not written into the email.