Newsbrew: email newsletters digest

You subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters.

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They hit your inbox on different days and times scattered amongst all the other email you get. Your inbox is a mess.

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Is there a way for you to tame your inbox and put all those newsletters into a single digest?!

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Yes.

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Enter Newsbrew.

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Sound oddly familiar? Probably because Newsbrew is basically Mailbrew but re-built in Zapier. Heyo!

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Last week a friend and I talked about re-building Mailbrew in Zapier. So, that’s exactly what I did.

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Today I’ll show you how to build a weekly digest of all your newsletters using Zapier.

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A Canvas is worth a thousand words

The Newsbrew system is pretty straightforward. I created a Zapier Canvas to show you.

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1. New emails labeled as “Newsletter” get added to Zapier Tables
2. Every Monday an email is sent and the digest is created in Zapier Interfaces

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Adding AI to your digest

One of the best things AI does is summarize. 

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As new emails are labeled and added into the Zapier table, I use ChatGPT to summarize the email. I also have it give an estimated read time. 

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AI is really good at this.

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A table captures it all

I hold everything in the Zapier table for easy reference and so that the connected interface can show each week’s digest.

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If you’re super curious about how the digest populates each week, here’s what I did.

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I included two extra fields in the table. There’s one checkbox that’s marked as soon as an email is included in a digest. The digest will only pull emails that haven’t been checked. 

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The second is the digest issue (by date) that an email is included in. 

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The digest issue date allows me to filter by issue from the interface.

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When the email is sent to me each week with the link to the digest interface, it includes URL params that automatically filter/select the current week’s digest issue when I visit the interface. WIN!

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There’s so much you could [re]create in Zapier. Newsbrew was fun to build but considering Mailbrew looks a bit better and is now free (!), I highly suggest using it instead of building something yourself!

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To recap:

• Newsbrew is your digest of email newsletters (inspired by Mailbrew)
• One Zap gets labeled emails, summarizes them, and adds them to a table
• An interface shows the digest issue with summaries and links to the original emails

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce