AOL may have just discovered the perfect solution for those countless email users who are frustrated with the way they have to contend with junk mails every day. The email service has just released an update to Alto, an email app that AOL promised is smart enough to filter what is important and what is rubbish.
For those who do not know what Alto is, it is an email aggregator that organizes all your email accounts in one place. For instance, a user can combine his or her Gmail, Yahoo and AOL email accounts within the app.
Now, one could say that the sheer number of data from multiple mail accounts further aggravates the junk mail problem or that it could simply lose a user in the convoluted mix of bills, subscriptions, receipts, spam and personal correspondence. Alto is offering the stacks filing system to address this issue of email organization.
"Stacks help you organize your mail based on what's in it, not who sent it or when it was received," the team behind Alto explained.
But Alto is also taking things further with its new Cards and Dashboard features. The idea seems akin to an intelligent assistant that will sift through your emails, organize them according to importance and present them as cards in the timeline. For example, it creates slides that look similar to the cards in Google Now dedicated to specific categories such as the grouping for flight schedule, hotel reservations and product shipping information. This might remind one of an app called TripIt, which bundles email information into one Trip file. The cards are grouped together through the app's Dashboard feature. Here, users can expect not just bundled emails but that they are also lumped together in chronological order with relevant and timely information automatically highlighted.
"Alto Dashboard surfaces the important information users need at the precise moment it's needed, and presents that information as actionable 'cards' which makes the information both easier to consume and easier to pull into other apps," AOL said in a Cult of Mac report.
Presently, Alto offers easier integration with other apps such as the Calendar, Uber and Waze, among others.
The Dashboard feature is still not sophisticated enough to create groupings, which are labeled in contexts. It cannot, for example, bundle all relevant mails under a Trip to New York slide or under Filing Expense Report slide. The developers working on Alto, however, said that they are already working on this feature.
Alto Dashboard is available for free to both Android and iOS users.
