Email Summarizer — Python CLI

A small Python CLI that turns a noisy inbox into a one-page digest using OpenAI. Point it at .eml files or a live IMAP inbox; get back a prioritized list of what actually needs your attention.

Each email gets a structured summary: TL;DR headline, 2-3 sentence body, priority, category, and an explicit action_required flag. Output as a colored terminal table, a markdown digest you can paste into a standup, or JSON for further processing.

Email Digest (3 messages) ┏━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳──────────────────────────────────────────┳━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Priority ┃ From ┃ Headline ┃ Action ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇──────────────────────────────────────────╇━━━━━━━━┩ │ HIGH │ Priya Shah │ Q3 priorities, headcount & migration ETA │ YES │ │ LOW │ TLDR Newsletter │ Apple's $500B chip bet, OpenAI Agents v2 │ — │ │ LOW │ GitHub │ PR #14 opened on JoshuaKushnir/ai-chatbot│ — │ └──────────┴──────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┘

Parse — .eml files via Python's email package; IMAP via imaplib over SSL

Summarize — each message goes to OpenAI Chat Completions with response_format=json_object and a system prompt that locks the output schema (headline, summary, action_required, priority, category)

Render — rich for terminal tables, a hand-rolled markdown renderer, and raw JSON for piping into other tools

Bodies are truncated to 6000 chars before sending, so a single noisy newsletter can't blow up token usage.

Structured JSON outputs from OpenAI. Every model response is locked to a strict schema. No free-form text parsing.

Dual input sources. Local .eml files for offline testing and demos; live IMAP over SSL for production inboxes. Same pipeline, same output.

Three output formats. Rich terminal tables for quick scanning, markdown for pasting into standups or docs, JSON for piping into other tools.

57 pytest tests. Covers .eml parsing (plain, HTML, multipart), all three renderers, summarize with mocked OpenAI client, CLI parser, IMAP env validation, and glob expansion.

Python 3.10+

OpenAI Chat Completions (gpt-4o-mini) with response_format=json_object

Rich for terminal output

imaplib for live inbox access

pytest for testing (57 tests)