In this document I want to show you how to process and summarize email newsletters using NitroDigest in combination with **Himalaya**, a command-line email client.
## Prerequisites
Before starting, you'll need:
- **NitroDigest** installed and configured
- **Himalaya** email client installed ([https://github.com/pimalaya/himalaya](https://github.com/pimalaya/himalaya))
- Email account configured with Himalaya
- Ollama running locally with your preferred model
### Installing Himalaya
```bash
# Install via cargo (recommended)
cargo install himalaya
# Or download binary from releases
# https://github.com/pimalaya/himalaya/releases
# Configure your email account
himalaya account configure
```
## Basic Email Processing Workflow
### Step 1: List Unread Emails
Start by viewing your unread newsletters and emails:
```bash
himalaya envelope list not flag seen
```
**Example output:**
```bash
| ID | FLAGS | SUBJECT | FROM | DATE |
|------|-------|---------------------------------------------------|-------------------------|-------------------------|
| 1823 | * | Google's IO conference was wild | Mindstream | 2025-05-29 15:07+00:00 |
| 1822 | * | Python Weekly - Issue 701 | Python Weekly | 2025-05-29 15:05+00:00 |
| 1821 | * | Elon's xAI is paying Telegram $300M to adopt Grok| AI Valley | 2025-05-29 14:54+00:00 |
| 1820 | * | š¤ Smartphone giant Honor enters humanoid race | The Rundown Robotics | 2025-05-29 14:32+00:00 |
| 1819 | * | DeepSeek R1 Update š, Hugging Face CodeAgents š» | TLDR AI | 2025-05-29 13:26+00:00 |
```
### Step 2: Read Specific Email
Choose an email to process and save it to a file:
```bash
# Read email by ID and save to markdown file
himalaya message read 1823 > message.md
```
### Step 3: Generate Summary
Create a summary of the email content:
```bash
# Generate summary to separate file
nitrodigest message.md > message_summary.md
# Or append summary to the original email file
nitrodigest message.md >> message.md
```
## Advanced Email Processing Workflow
You can speed up reading emails with a bash script that reads multiple emails at a time and saves them to separate files.
You can find script here [https://gist.github.com/Frodigo/7b04dbf4098684e61188d8f4957f7ed5](https://gist.github.com/Frodigo/7b04dbf4098684e61188d8f4957f7ed5).
### Step 1: Download the script and make it executable
Download it and save as `process-emails.sh`.
Make it executable:
```bash
chmod +x process-emails.sh
```
### Step 2: Save unread emails to json file
Himalaya has a nice option `--output` that allows to save emails to json file. Usage:
```bash
himalaya envelope list --output json not flag seen >> emails.json
```
When this command is done, you will have your email list in the JSON file.
### Step 4: Read email content
In JSON file we have an array with emails. Each item include email ID and subject (+ other information).
The bash script you downloaded is looping through this array and read specific email.
Content of email is saved to directory you specified.
Usage:
```bash
./process-emails.sh emails.json messages_to_read
```
In this case script reads information about emails from the `emails.json` file and save emails content in the `messages_to_read` directory
### Step 5: Summarize emails
Now you can summarize emails you fetched in the previous steps using NitroDigest. You can summarize all of them at once, or one by one.
Command below summarizes email and adds summary to the same file:
```bash
nitrodigest my_email.md >> my_email.md
```
---
Found an issue? Report a bug: [https://github.com/Frodigo/garage/issues/new](https://github.com/Frodigo/garage/issues/new)
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