Summarize missed emails with Copilot

After a relaxing and much-deserved vacation, returning to find your work email bursting with messages might cast a shadow on your after-vacation glow. Fortunately, Copilot is here to help you catch up on all the emails you missed while you were away. In this article, we'll discuss how Copilot can summarize key points in your emails, highlight important messages, and more so you can quickly get up to speed without having to slog through each notification.

Catch up on emails with Copilot

When you're staring down a mountain of emails after time away from your desk, you might be wishing you had someone to give you the two-sentence summary, rather than the whole saga, of what happened while you were away. With the purchase of a Copilot Pro subscription, this intelligent assistant works with your Microsoft 365 Outlook app to summarize and categorize the emails you missed right in your Outlook email, so you can jump back into your workflow without getting bogged down.

To access Copilot in Outlook, open the email application on your device and select the Copilot icon in either the left sidebar or the top right-hand corner. From there, you can enter prompts related to your emails, such as these:

1. Summarize emails from my manager sent between [dates].
2. List all the high-priority emails I received during the last week.
3. Categorize emails sent between [dates] by project.
4. Summarize the action points in my emails sent from [name] between [dates].

Manage your emails with Copilot

To help make your inbox less overwhelming, you may want to consider using some of the following tricks for email management:

Set time aside daily for email management

When you have time in your daily schedule set apart for going through your inbox, it helps you stay on top of your communications and prevents emails from piling up. You can focus on responding to the most important emails by using Copilot to scan and summarize them with prompts such as “Highlight the action items from my emails sent from [name]” or “Can you highlight the important deadlines mentioned in my inbox since yesterday?”