Triage your Gmail with this easy Gemini hack

I profess to dislike Personal Intelligence, the Google tool that allows Gemini to reference your Google searches, past Gemini chats, Gmail inbox, and other Google data when responding to your queries.

Now available to all US Google users and no longer stuck behind a paywall, Personal Intelligence can be pushy and annoying, with Gemini too often interjecting with random asides about my life and background (“As a PCWorld writer…”) when I just want an answer to a simple question.

That said, personal intelligence do has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, and this Gmail hack is among the most powerful.

With a simple prompt and Personal Intelligence enabled, you can ask Gemini to quickly go through and sort your Gmail inbox, perfect for pulling out your most important messages and presenting summaries of the rest in order of priority.

Just to be clear, this Personal Intelligence feature doesn’t actually sort or delete your actual Gmail messages, which means there’s no risk of Gemini accidentally destroying your inbox. Instead, think of it as a summary of your most important daily messages, perfect for taking a quick glance at your inbox before diving in.

In terms of privacy, it’s a mixed bag. Although Google says it won’t train Gemini directly on your messages, it reserves the right to train Gemini on “limited” information, such as chats with Gemini about your email or the model’s responses to your queries.

If this caveat sounds good to you and you’re ready to move forward, the first step is to enable Gemini Personal Intelligence on your Google account (the feature is optional, meaning you should proactively enable it). Go to the Gemini app (iOS, Android or on the web), select Settings > Personal Intelligence > Connected Appsthen activate the option Google Workspace option.

Next, go to the left column, start a new Gemini chat, and ask Gemini to give you a summary of your Gmail inbox. Exactly how you create this prompt is up to you. Just know that your final prompt will have a big impact on Gemini’s response.

I took a two-step approach here, first asking Gemini (using the intensive “thinking” model) to write its own prompt: “I’d like to use Gemini Personal Intelligence to help me sort through my Gmail messages in the morning.” Can you help me find a good prompt for this?

Gemini thinks for a few moments then comes up with this:

Fast: Using @Gmail, check my unread emails from the last 24 hours. Provide a concise morning briefing organized into the following categories:

Immediate action: Emails from my core team, bosses, or family that need a response today. Briefly summarize the request and note any delays.

Project updates: Topics related to [Insert Active Project Name] Or [Insert Active Project Name]. Just give me the “latest status” in one sentence.

News and readings: A bulleted list of newsletters or industry updates I should check when I have a break.

Low priority/FYI: Calendar invitations, automatic notifications, or receipts that don’t require a response.

For each “Immediate Action” item, suggest a one-sentence draft response that I could use.

Gemini also suggested some customizations for this prompt. For example, you can specifically set important people in the “Immediate Action” section to ensure their messages are prioritized, or you can ask it to group frequent emails you receive from, say, Expedia, GitHub, or Jupiter.

(You might also note the “@Gmail” tag that explicitly tells Gemini to call its Gmail tool; it’s a good way to ensure that Gemini knows to ping your PII information, but in most cases it’s not strictly necessary.)

I went ahead and fired up the prompt for my morning Gmail, and got a nicely organized sheet with a few key emails at the top, including suggested replies, summaries of a few newsletters I’m subscribed to, and a few low-priority updates at the bottom. I checked my inbox shortly after and yes, the Gemini summary was accurate.

Although Gemini hasn’t actually taken action on the posts in its list, it has embedded links for each post; pressing a link took me directly to the missive in question.

So, yes, this Gmail personal intelligence tip is convenient and relatively safe, but it only offers a taste of what a real AI personal assistant could do. For starters, there is no way to automate this prompt, you will have to run it manually every morning.

Additionally, while we’ve seen horror stories about agentic AI tools like OpenClaw accidentally wasting email inboxes, an ideal AI agent would be be able to (securely) sort your messages, eliminate spam, and even automatically respond to low priority senders.

That said, this personal information tip for Gmail is a great place to start.

Note: Both Claude and ChatGPT have their own Google integrations, allowing similar Gmail inbox summarization tricks. Better yet, Claude Cowork in the Claude Desktop app could be configured to trigger more complex and automated tasks. I’ll cover those details soon, so stay tuned.