Work & OperationsDone with n8n
Summarize newsletters into a Notion database
An n8n workflow retrieves newsletters, summarizes them with an LLM and stores them in Notion, splitting long summaries to fit block limits.
- What They Did
- The n8n workflow reads unread emails over IMAP, then filters by date and by a list of allowed senders. An OpenAI-backed summarization chain turns each remaining newsletter into bullet points that keep source URLs. Summaries over 1,950 characters are split by a code node. The first chunk creates the Notion page, and the later chunks are appended to that page by its URL.
- How It Went
- In the walkthrough, 15 unread emails were narrowed to 3 summaries, all written to Notion. The author's multi-email chunking fix worked. The IMAP filter rules were unreliable, and the author chose the wrong summarization method at first.
- Worth Knowing
- Only OpenAI ran reliably. Claude hit token limits mid-run after tokens were already spent, and local Llama2 errored. The author planned to switch from map-reduce to the simpler stuff method.
Try it yourself with n8n
Build an n8n workflow that pulls newsletters from my [email label or folder], summarizes each one with an AI model into a title, sender, 5 key bullets and a link, and saves them to my Notion database [database name]. If a summary is longer than Notion's block limit, split it across several blocks. You're done when a test run saves my last [number] newsletters correctly; show me the workflow before activating it.
Do this with a skill.
These SkillShop playbooks do this exact job.