What's the Cursor or Midjourney of email? Since I started working on Onbox, I've been obsessed with this question. Those products deliver 10x improvements compared to incumbents, not incremental ones.
Current Gmail or Outlook alternatives mostly offer faster load times or prettier interfaces.
With AI, we can do better than a faster horse.
So, what's a 10x better email client?
It Should Be More Like an Executive Assistant
A 10x better email client should feel like an executive assistant. The reason is that you don't want to handle the triage, the filtering, or the searching. You want to be able to focus on the work you love.
Just like Cursor has a coding assistant inside your editor that lets you focus on architecture and design, a 10x better email client should have an assistant that takes on the mundane work.
So, like a great executive assistant, Onbox should:
- Sort important emails from noise
- Draft replies and schedule meetings
- Extract action items and follow up automatically
- Research context before you respond
- Handle simple tasks, following your instructions
It Should Be Connected to Your Other Tools
Most of the time, email is not where most work gets done. You often need to move files or data to other apps. You also need to retrieve files or data to reply. This translates into lots of clicks and tab switching. Uploading an invoice or sharing a document should take one step, not many. To make email smooth, your inbox must connect to your other tools.
How to Make That Really Work
Handling each email separately can only take you so far. It leads to poor triage, bad prioritization, and doesn't give your assistant enough context to truly shine. You need to be able to tie each message to all relevant context, whether it's in other email threads or in your other tools.
Also, customization is key. Even within the same industry, people's habits and processes can be very different. That's why, you should be able to instruct your assistant on how to handle emails—exactly like you would when you delegate to a human.
That's why, we're working on those two building blocks:
- Smart email indexing that builds a knowledge graph—your email history becomes the assistant's brain
- Customizable playbooks that handle emails automatically for your specific workflows
We're also building a full-featured email client that matches Gmail's capabilities, so you never need to switch back.
We're targeting alpha access by year-end 🚀.
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