We have seen many desktop email clients like Outlook 2010, Thunderbird and also the recently reviewed Inky. But how about using a web-based IMAP email client that lets you manage multiple email accounts on one website? Alto from AOL is a new webmail client which supports multiple email services. AOL has announced Alto back in October last year, it is still in closed beta, but you can request for invite.
Altomail as of now connects, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and iCloud email services and you can add multiple accounts into one interface. One feature that makes Altomail worth using is the clean interface and also some of the other useful features like stacks.
When using your email, one thing which is most annoying is the notifications from different services like social networks, deal sites and others. This is where Altomail excels, it comes with a feature called Stacks, which as per AOL is “Stacks are digital manifestations of physical processes”. Stack groups your message based on the type. There are some default stacks like social networks, deals etc. For example, when you enable the Social Stack, all the notifications, friend requests and invites will be automatically grouped and you can even skip them from Inbox.
There is also a chart showing the social notifications (or from other stacks).
There are multiple views available based on how you want to read your emails (relaxed, comfortable and compact similar to Gmail).
The app also features a context menu for emails, you can star a message or create a new stack for the message or add them to an existing stack. The service also has default stacks for emails with attachments and photos.
There is also an integrated search, which searches all your email accounts. Alto’s search tool also divides up results into messages, contact cards, and photos related to your query.
Overall, Altomail looks promising and we are hopeful that before the actual public release, we might see more features being added to.
You can get an invite here.
