“I’ll just read this email now and reply to it when I have more time,” I thought this morning for the 367th time this week. As you can probably imagine, the email was not followed up, and now the world will never know about that Kickstarted app. Opening emails and forgetting to actually reply to them is one of my worst digital habits, which is why I’m delighted that third-party email app Newton is introducing a new feature called Recap to fix me.
“Recap automatically brings back conversations that are waiting for your reply or that need following up, in case you missed them. It also covers other mails with due dates, reminders etc., so that nothing slips through the cracks,” Newton says.
Provided that this feature works even 1/10th as well as they claim, it’s going to be a game-changer for me. The only potential pitfall I can see is becoming too reliant on an AI to remind me of things, so that the one time it doesn’t have my back, I definitely won’t remember to follow up.
“Never had a workflow? Have you been sloppy with email? Fret not, Recap has your back,” Newton designer Umesh Gopinath said in a blog post. “It’s designed to make you diligent at emailing without expecting you to follow any strict manual workflows. We have been using it and fine tuning it internally for some time. It works for us and we can assure you that it will work for you too.”
The only other problem is the price. Newton is a subscription service costing $9.99 a month, and there’s no two ways about it: That’s crazy expensive for an email app.
