I pitted ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude against a day of emails—only one actually got it right

Published Jul 30, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Deciding which AI to use has always been a challenge. If a company releases a new model, by the time you've switched, the service you've just left has dropped an even better one of its own. Even more confusingly, some models are better at specific jobs than others. I wanted to see which of the big three AI chatbots could do the best job of summarizing a day's worth of emails. I anonymized the emails before I uploaded them AI companies don't need to know my personal information I picked a random day and used Google Apps Script to export the emails in my Gmail account from that day to a text file. This was the quickest way I could think of to get the raw text of the emails that I could share with each chatbot. All three chatbots allow you to link your Gmail account and access your emails. This isn't surprising for Gemini, since it's Google's own AI, but both ChatGPT and Claude also have official connectors. I didn't really want to give these chatbots full read access to my emails, however, so exporting the messages felt like the safest option. Once exported, I then anonymized the data with a Python script to replace any sensitive data such as names and email addresses. I did a final manual edit to remove anything that the script had missed. Once I was happy that my personal data had been obscured, I uploaded the same text file to each chatbot, with the following prompt: Summarize this day’s emails into: 1. Urgent actions I need to take 2. Important information I should know 3. Messages I can safely ignore 4. A chronological list of deadlines, appointments, and promised follow-ups Include the sender and subject for every item. Do not invent information. If something is unclear, say so. Gemini missed almost everything important It did the worst job of the three You would imagine that Google's AI would be great at summarizing emails from a Gmail account. I was pretty surprised at how bad the results were. I used the Gemini 3.5 Flash model that is described as being "for all-around help," which seemed like it fit this use case. The response that I got was fairly minimal, and really unimpressive. Gemini said that there were no urgent actions to be taken, even though one of the email threads about rearranging a piano lesson was unresolved and needed further action. Another email relating to an upcoming bill payment would also require action to ensure that there were available funds to cover the bill. Gemini missed them both. The piano lesson thread was mentioned in the "Important information you should know" section, but Gemini merely restated the facts, and did not point out that the arrangement of the piano lesson had not been resolved. It didn't even mention the upcoming bill payment anywhere in its response, including the "Messages I can safely ignore" section. If I were relying on Gemini to summarize my emails, my daughter would have missed her piano lesson, and I might have had a missed bill payment. ChatGPT highlighted some things but missed a lot It only found two useful pieces of information I gave the exact same prompt to ChatGPT, which was using GPT-5.5 Instant. This is the default setting for standard conversations, so it felt like a fair comparison with Gemini. ChatGPT did do a little better. There were still no urgent actions listed, so it missed the fact that the piano lesson time was unresolved, or that I had an upcoming bill. Unlike Gemini, however, ChatGPT did mention that I'd received a payment from a family member, which is information I would want an email summary to include. ChatGPT also noted that an Amazon parcel had been delivered, which Gemini had also failed to mention. Disappointingly, however, ChatGPT made no mention of the multi-message email thread about the piano lesson at all, even in the "Messages I can safely ignore" section. Once again, if I'd been relying on ChatGPT to summarize my emails for me without reading them, my daughter would have missed her piano lesson, and I wouldn't have known about the upcoming bill payment. Claude was by far the most useful Anthropic's AI didn't miss a beat I was beginning to think that maybe the worries about AI taking all our jobs were misguided, as these popular models couldn't even summarize my email accurately. There was only one chatbot left to try. I used the Sonnet 5 model in Claude which is intended for everyday tasks. Thankfully, Claude was actually able to do the job it was tasked with. It listed two urgent actions, the first being the piano lesson thread. Claude stated that "this looks like it needs a same-day reply/confirmation to book the lesson time," which was exactly the case. Claude also listed the upcoming bill payment in the "Urgent actions you need to take" section, giving the date of the payment, and even suggesting that I check with the company what exact amount was due to be taken, since I'd edited this to "undisclosed." Claude found the family payment and the Amazon order but also found another invoice which it correctly filed under "Important information you should know." It also gave a complete list of the other emails in the "Messages you can safely ignore" section, correctly categorizing most of them as marketing or promotional emails. This was exactly what I'd expected from ChatGPT and Gemini: a full and thorough response that included all the useful information that I needed. I was genuinely surprised that Claude was the only chatbot that could pull it off. Different chatbots have different strengths This isn't to say that you should immediately switch to Claude and ditch ChatGPT and Gemini. This was one very narrow test of one specific task. Claude is inferior to ChatGPT and Gemini in other ways, such as the fact that Claude is unable to read content from Reddit threads. For this one test, however, Claude was far and away the winner.