AOL Unveils Alto: New Cloud Based Mail Service Top Features Explained

E-mail management is always a difficult task for most users because of the large quantity of messages they receive from news sites, retailers and other social networks. AOL has arrived with a solution for this problem. The company has introduced a web based IMAP client for handling the existing accounts cutting off any need to sign up for any other e-mail addresses. 

The new web client announced by the company for its Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud is Alto. Alto is a web client equivalent to desktop clients such as Sparrow, Outlook and Post-box. It extends support to a handful of services including Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud. 

Alto -- What are the Key Aspects?

Alto web client has in store many useful features. Take a look. 

The web client is designed to support five e-mail accounts at the same time from a single interface.

Alto automatically organizes everything on a stack basis, categorizing mail items into photos, attachments, social notifications and retailers. This new feature allows users to easily read e-mails of their choice and postpone reading of other mails which users would like to access at a later stage.

Users will be able to create new stacks by dragging e-mails in to the dashboard aptly utilizing the drag and drop interface.

Another feature in AOL Alto web client is the presence of three views inside a stack message. It includes traditional message list view, visual Grid which shows the pictures and attachments in a highlighted manner and page view allows which allows users to flip through the e-mail full screen on a page by page basis

Analytics about the messages will also be displayed within each of the stacks. For example, there is an option titled ‘Social Notifications’ using which users will be able to view the total number of messages present and also the number of unread messages in it. It also has a universal search feature which runs across all the e-mail accounts. It has a snooze button which is designed to bring up the messages for which users were not able to respond. It will bring those messages towards the top of the inbox after 30 minutes, one hour or more.

The ‘People’ tab displays details regarding the conversations being exchanged between user and the person on the other side, including e-mails.

The Alto web client also has a separate section for establishing integration with social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The new web client from AOL is built up on HTML 5 and is ad-free.