AOL’s Alto Makes Your Inbox Pretty

AOL may be revolutionizing the way you read and organize your emails – at least this is what they are hoping with Alto, a cloud-based email product, designed to work with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, .Mac and .me accounts.

Alto is available in limited preview today, accepting new users on a first come, first serve basis.

Because first impressions matter, Alto is focused on looks rather than content. Your inbox will welcome you with large thumbnails, the visual aids that help you navigate easily through emails containing images, attachments or other relevant data you choose to organize. To put it simply, Alto allows you to organize your emails as it is most relevant to you, in collections called “stacks.” Alto is pre-loaded with stacks built to automatically surface photos, attachments, and social notifications, retailers and daily deals, but you can also drag and drop individual emails to create your own stacks based on sender, recipients, key words, and more.

Alto reimagines the email experience to combat inbox fatigue. (Image via Endgadget)

This will eventually help you get a better overview of your email data, without having to search through an endless pile of emails, organized today as a list view by most email programs. For example, the “photos stack” in Alto, sorts automatically all the images you send and receive through any of your email accounts. Then, you can search for older photos, or see new images as they arrive. Photos can be sorted by sender, date, and inbox, or shared right from Alto to Facebook or Twitter.

The Daily Deals and Retailers stack will collect automatically all sales pitches. If you turn on ‘skip the inbox’, stacks will clear these emails out of your message list, leaving room for what matters.