Alto’s redesign of your inbox makes it a prettier place.
Everyone hates e-mail. E-mail is broken. E-mail is the literal, biblical devil. Sure, it may still be useful. But it’s often just a chore. Do you remember when it used to be fun? Alto wants to make it fun again, and more useful as well, by changing up the traditional e-mail interface from a folders-and-messages view to one that revolves around what it calls stacks.
Oh, yeah, and it’s from AOL. You know, the “You’ve Got Mail” company?
Alto isn’t a new mail service, but rather a web-based mail client that works with e-mail from AOL, Apple, Google, and Yahoo. It has plans to expand to any IMAP-based mail provider in the future. It sorts mail into stacks, which are meant to be reminiscent of the way you sort your physical mail into piles of bills, personal mail, junk mail and the like. By default, there are stacks for photos, attachments, social notifications, retailers and daily deals. But you can drag and drop an e-mail onto the main screen to create a new one for, say, e-mails from your wife.
Click on a stack and it shows messages in a visual grid, rather than the traditional pile that you get when you open a folder in a mail client. It highlights images and attachments in messages, rather than subject lines, and even does a little math and gives you an infographic about the messages in a particular stack. It also has some very smart search features that make creating new stacks from searches quite easy, and timeline-based tools to help you sort through the years and years’ worth of mail you likely have clogging up your mailbox.
While this may not be the complete fix for e-mail, it’s a start. And it certainly is helpful in helping to bring e-mails that aren’t just work-related to the forefront.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/alto-aims-to-make-email-pretty-again/
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