ALTO Mail

In the crowded market of email clients, Alto Mail seems like the underdog. Developed by AOL, which has seen its place in the sun fade significantly over the past two decades, Alto Mail is going up against some of the biggest names in the business. Linux, Mac, and Windows all have standard email clients built right into their operating systems, while Google has made great strides in creating a completely cloud-based email platform that coordinates with every aspect of your life. It's a little surprising then at how good Alto Mail is. AOL seems to understand the tools that people use in their daily lives and put together an intuitive plan for making them all work n unison with each other. And an aggressive push to update features and add new integrations over the course of Alto Mail's life has managed to keep it competitive. Chances that all of the mail you received isn't confined to a single account. Even beyond separate work and personal emails, people often have specialized accounts intended for specific purposes. The sheer legacy of email has made it an unwieldy process, and Alto Mail is designed to be a client that smartly filters out the unimportant stuff to focus on the information that really matters. You can link all of your email accounts to this single client and then rely on its intuitive dashboard to help you get a more streamlined perspective on your inboxes. The dashboard is a game changer in the email client space. Accessed from a single button on the lower left corner of the app, the dashboard serves as the heart of the navigational experience. From here, all of your mail is sorted and filtered into a number of smart "stacks", which are essentially content sorting categories. This goes well beyond the basic filtering settings you'll find in most email clients. Alto does a very good job of organizing materials, whether that means putting all your shipping receipts together in one place or separating newsletters from professional correspondence. These stacks are then sorted into cards which can be prioritized or ignored with a simple swipe. It's a similar function to Google's cancelled Now service, but it works exceptionally well on a mobile interface. The design is clean, colorful, and easy to use, and AOL has been aggressive in their strategy of expanding Alto Mail's features over the course of its life. While this email client has essentially bridged the gap between traditional mail assistant and virtual assistant since its inception, the integration of Alexa has further increased its credibility, and the addition of a calendar allows it to serve as essentially a single platform for organizing your schedule. Alto Mail scours through all of your email boxes in search of date and time information and compiles a thorough schedule on your calendar.