How to summarise newsletters into a Notion database with n8n

Research & monitoringn8n

The problem

Useful newsletters go unread because there are too many of them; you want the key points, with links, in one searchable place.

Tools needed

• n8n
• IMAP email
• OpenAI (summarisation chain)
• Notion

Step-by-step recipe

1. Read unread emails over IMAP in n8n.
2. Filter by date and by a list of allowed senders.
3. Summarise each remaining newsletter into bullet points that keep the source URLs.
4. Split summaries that exceed Notion's text-block limit (the source splits at 1,950 characters) with a Code node.
5. Create the Notion page from the first chunk and append the rest to it.

Copyable prompt

Summarise this newsletter for my research notes.
- 3 to 7 bullet points, each one fact or idea, no hype.
- Keep the original link next to each bullet it came from.
- End with one line: "Worth reading in full?" yes/no and why.

Newsletter: {{email_text}}

What the builder reported

In the walkthrough, 15 unread emails were narrowed to 3 summaries, all written to Notion. The IMAP filter rules were unreliable and the author first picked the wrong summarisation method.

These are the source author's own claims. AgentRecipes has not tested or verified them.

Watch out for

• Only OpenAI ran reliably for the author; Claude hit token limits mid-run after tokens were spent, and a local Llama 2 errored.
• The author planned to switch from map-reduce to the simpler 'stuff' summarisation method.

Source

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