The emails I usually get at work are not super useful — I mainly conduct work via Slack — but we get lunch at work, and the menu is usually sent to us as an email at the start of the week. I have food allergies so I try to keep atop of these just to know if I need to organise lunch for myself one day.

I was a little careless this week, and missed a lunch that had satay sauce, resulting in an unpleasent allergic reaction (nothing too serious, but still not a good time). I resolved to prevent this happening again by adding a rule that highlighted emails containing “nut” or “satay.” Adding the rule is… fine. It kinda sorta works, but it’s not perfect: running the rule flagged a few false positives.

But upgrading to a version of MacOS that had Apple AI, it struck me that these emails are getting processed by an LLM already, in order to power Mail’s email summaries and priorities. Like many others I find these features pretty useless, mainly because what is considered important it’s usually not relevant to me (I’m on heaps of mailing lists).

But what if I could tell Mail what’s important to me, and how I want it to respond? One could imagine me clicking into one of these weekly menu emails, engaging the LLM, and typing in an instruction like this:

This email comes in on Monday and list the lunch menu for each day of the week. When you see an item that has nuts, or an ingredient that is derived from nut, such as “satay”, highlight the email in red and flag it using the red flag.

I have no idea whether this is even possible using current tech. Certaintly it’s possible for an LLM to ingest the body of an email and work out if there is any indication of ingredients containing nuts (I’ve tested this using OpenAI’s API) but it might be more difficult mixing both the condition and action in a single request like this. Might be that a more guided experience is warrented, maybe in the form of a “if email looks like this, then do this”:

Auto-generated description: An email received on Monday from yada-yada@example.com, resembling a lunch menu with a peanut-containing item like Satay, should be marked in red and flagged.

I don’t know. I’m not a designer. But I know such a feature would be more useful to me that what’s in Mail right now. And I think the seeds are there for this to work. Apple just needs to let us users take the reins a little more.