Alto Keeps Your Email and Calendar Organized the Right Way
When you’re trying to juggle hundreds of emails and dozens of appointments, you want a good way to manage it all. You might have packages being delivered, meetings to go to, or presentations to give. A full-featured email client is nice, but it’s even better to have one that manages your calendar, too. Enter the new version of Alto, which now handles both email and calendar organization for you.
Your Email and Calendar, Re-imagined
The core beauty behind Alto lies in how it organizes your email and calendar. You can sift through all the stuff that doesn’t matter with ease, thanks to Alto’s Stacks feature. Quickly and easily access just your unread messages, or find the emails that have those files you need to work on today.
Browse your email by Stacks
In Alto, you can view a traditional email inbox, or you can sift through the email by Stacks. These allow you to see email that's personal, email you've snoozed, messages that contain files, or ones that include photos. There are plenty of other Stacks, too: unread, starred, shopping, travel, finance, and social. It's a great way to organize your email by topic, allowing you to focus on what's important at that time. You won't be distracted by Facebook email notifications, for example, when you're trying to sort through the email your colleagues used to send you the latest version of the TPS report. You can even create your own Stack, a custom and gorgeous way of putting email filters into place for those ultra-important messages.
Don’t Forget It, Snooze It
When you get an email, sometimes you don’t have time to deal with it right then and there. Other times, you’re waiting for more information. To help you never forget to act on an email again, you can snooze it for later. This is a handy feature that more and more email apps are incorporating, and Alto does it almost perfectly. The only thing missing is read receipts, but I haven’t found any apps so far that offer that feature without a subscription fee.
Snooze email for later
Received an important email that you need to act on later and don't want to forget? Just Snooze it until the right time to work on it, and you won't have to worry about forgetting. Alto will hide it from your view, temporarily, and then bring it back to the top of your Inbox at just the right time. You can't forget to turn in that TPS report when you've got Alto by your side -- the app will remind you when it's due by popping the email from your boss right to the top of your inbox for you to act on it.
A Dashboard for Your Life
The newest feature to Alto is the Dashboard, which brings in email and calendar integration to help keep you organized. Within the Dashboard, you’ll see important information not only from your calendar, but also from any of your email inboxes, so you don’t forget that you have a flight leaving tonight at 8pm.
Despite all of our smart devices and apps, one of the hardest questions for anyone to answer is still “what do I have going on today?” You have personal appointments, business meetings, packages being delivered, emails that need responses, and a flight leaving tonight that you booked months ago. All of this critical information is scattered across multiple personal and business inboxes and calendars, so you’re left hopping around a bunch of apps, trying to piece together your day. Alto puts an end to all of that.
- Arlo Rose, General Manager, AltoView your day at a glance from the Dashboard
The latest version of Alto adds calendar support, allowing you to manage your email and events within the same app. Just go to your Dashboard, and you'll see your day laid out for you. Alto goes through your email messages and figures out events and travel itineraries, putting those into the proper place for you along with your normal calendar information. It makes it easy to stay focused on your time, and never miss a flight again. You can add items to your calendar straight from within Alto, either by hand or from the Stack items that Alto displays in your Dashboard for you.
It Works With Alexa, too
Alto has also been updated with an Alexa Skill, so you can just ask your Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Tap to check your email and calendar with a simple voice command. Just search in the Alexa app for the Alto Skill and enable it. Then, you can ask Alexa, “Ask Alto what today looks like,” and you’ll get a rundown of the day’s activities and meetings from your email and calendar.
You can find flight information, package deliveries, restaurant reservations, and emails from specific people with natural voice commands that sift through your email and calendars. What’s more, Alto’s Alexa integration works with more than just Google Calendars — it also works with iCloud, Yahoo, Exchange, Outlook.com and any other calendars you have set up within Alto on your iPhone or iPad.
Getting Alto’s Power Won’t Cost an Arm and a Leg
With all of that innovation and power in email and calendar organization, you might think Alto would be an expensive app to install. In fact, it isn’t. Alto is available for free on the App Store. The app requires iOS 9.0 or later, and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
