Quick Email Summaries with Apple Intelligence

The Mail app for iPad has gained a couple of really nice features with Apple Intelligence that help you browse your messages and get important context from them quicker than before. On the left-hand side of my inbox, I’ve now got a summary of the contents of the messages, rather than just the first couple of lines showing under the subject line. This means I can quickly see which emails are important.

I’ll show you in a moment how we can customise how long these previews are in the inbox, but now that I’ve got the whole message open, you can see it’s quite a lengthy one, and it might take a while to read through all of the information. Well, not to worry — Apple Intelligence can help by summarising the message for me into a couple of paragraphs. If I scroll back to the top of the email and press this new Summarise button, you’ll see that AI has taken the content of the message and written it out in a shorter format. From there, I can decide if the email is worth reading in full or if it’s not so relevant after all.

Now, back to those little summaries on the side in the inbox. If I jump out of Mail into the Settings app, I can customise the inbox summary length by searching for Mail at the top here, then tapping on Preview. I’ve got mine set to two lines, but if I go ahead and extend it to three or four lines, it will expand those message previews in the inbox. This gives me more or less information at a glance before I even open the email itself.

This won’t affect the notifications you get when new messages come in, but it will change the look of your inbox. And if you don’t want these AI-generated summaries at all and would prefer just the first few lines of the email, you can turn that feature off in the same settings area.

There’s no doubt that Apple Intelligence is going to transform the way we use our devices going forward. As they roll out new features gradually over the next few months, and maybe even years, I really suggest you subscribe to my channel down below. Whenever there’s a new feature I think is important, I’ll be sharing it there, along with hundreds of other tips to help you make the most of your iPad.

I’ll see you next time.