Email forwarding is one of those invisible workflows that powers half of modern work. You see something important, hit forward, add context, and send it to someone who needs to know. Simple, universal, and surprisingly hard to automate.
We wanted Sabine to participate in that workflow. Not just receive emails, but understand when an email is forwarded and extract the original message buried inside the forwarding wrapper. Every email client formats forwards differently—some use '---------- Forwarded message ---------', others use 'Begin forwarded message:', and some just dump everything into a quote block with no clear delimiter.
What We Built
This week we shipped a forwarded email parser that handles the most common formats from Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and others. When you forward an email to Sabine, she now extracts the original sender, subject line, timestamp, and body content—cleanly separated from your forwarding note.
This unlocks a new interaction pattern: bringing external conversations into your AI partnership without copy-paste gymnastics. Forward a customer email, add 'draft a thoughtful response,' and Sabine has full context. Forward a meeting invite with a dense agenda, ask for prep notes, and she sees the original details.
The parser uses a pattern-matching approach with fallback heuristics. We prioritize explicit delimiters first, then look for structural markers like 'From:', 'Date:', and 'Subject:' in sequence. If all else fails, we treat the entire body as forwarded content rather than lose information. It's not perfect—email is chaos—but it handles the 80% case reliably.
What's Next
This is the foundation for richer email workflows. We're exploring thread detection (handling 'Re:' and 'Fwd:' chains), attachment awareness, and calendar invite parsing. The broader vision is letting Sabine participate naturally in email-based collaboration without forcing users to switch contexts. Forward it, forget it, get intelligent help.
Small feature, big unlock. If you're using Sabine and have feedback on email handling, we want to hear it. This is one of those capabilities that gets better the more real-world edge cases we see.