Alexa for your inbox

ot another new email client. We know… but you mean not just another new email client, right? And it’s more than that. Astro (£free, helloastro.com), which currently works on Macs and IOS, with Android support coming soon, has all the usual grouping and snoozing skills but with an extra shot of AI. It’s home to Astrobot, a chatbot who sniffs through your Gmail or Office 365 inboxes and asks you want you want to do with whatever it finds. It understands normal language, so you can talk to it as if you’re just Whatsapping a particularly helpful/nosy friend.

NSo it’s like Alexa for my email? Kind of, although Astro will soon work with Alexa too, so you can chat with Astrobot via your Echo and get your inbox in order while you make dinner. As well as asking if you want to archive all emails older than a certain age, suggesting you just unsubscribe from that bog-snorkelling mailing list you never read and reminding you not to ignore your boss, it’ll also pick up on your habits – so if you always put off reading personal emails during the day (how conscientious of you), it will automatically mute them until after work. Sounds like just another distraction. Astrobot is easy to ignore if you’re busy, plus the more it learns about the way you work, the more it should be able to do without tapping you on the shoulder while you’re in the middle of something. It’s compatible with cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and icloud, can tell you all you need to know about people in your contacts list, and can schedule emails to be sent when you’re out on the golf course so it’ll look like you’re still beavering away at your desk. Good job, Astrobot – take the rest of the day off.