You paste an email into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask it to summarise the key points. The AI gives you a confused, incomplete response — or worse, confidently summarises the wrong thing. You paste the email in again with a better prompt. Same result.
The problem isn't the AI. The problem is the input.
What's actually inside an email
What looks like a simple email in your inbox is actually a dense, multi-part document. Behind the clean interface is something much messier. A typical HTML email might contain:
- Thousands of characters of HTML and inline CSS styling
- Base64-encoded tracking pixel images (often several kilobytes of gibberish)
- Boilerplate legal disclaimers and unsubscribe footers
- Email client-specific conditional comments (