AOL isn't exactly the first name in innovative web services anymore, so I was surprised when I was asked to check out a new web-based email client designed to "bring visual relief to overloaded inboxes."
Admittedly, I wasn't expecting much, but Alto is every bit the radical email overhaul AOL says it is. From its vibrant, distinctive interface to its clever handling of message threads and attachments, Alto is like no other email client I have ever used. It's so different, it doesn't just feel like a new email client, it feels like a whole new form of communication.
Alto obviously works with your existing AOL account--if anyone still has one--but it was refreshing to find that my iCloud address works too, as well as Gmail and Yahoo accounts. Logging on was fast and easy, at least as fast as Apple's or Google's web mail sites.
Where other email clients want you to organize and manage your email in folders, Alto practically encourages inbox clutter. With the use of Stacks, Alto did all the heavy lifting for me, organizing my attachments and photos into neat stacks that expand with a single tap. Custom stacks were easily created by dragging and dropping emails, and I had my whole inbox sorted within minutes.
Once you start mastering stacks, you won't want to give them up, and Alto offers the option to skip the inbox entirely and sort on the fly. I was concerned about losing or missing messages in my other apps, but Alto's stacks didn't seem to have any effect on incoming mail anywhere else.
Even beyond stacks, Alto has a fresh interface that makes other clients, including Mail or Sparrow, look dated. On my iPad, Alto is an absolute breath of fresh air. Font choices and layout make it feel more like a social networking service than a stuffy email client, down to the floating compose window, which gave my message a Twitter-like quickness. I only hope an App Store release is in the works; performance was acceptable through Safari on my iPad, but with such a heavy graphical interface, a dedicated app would definitely help smooth things out. Plus it's not supported on the iPhone's smaller screen.
Alto's pre-bundled daily deals and retailers stacks were a bit slow to load and had some trouble culling messages from my sorted folders. I encountered a few bugs here and there--including a particularly annoying one where email text stayed behind after closing the message--but nothing that shouldn't be fixed by the time its limited preview period is over. You can request an invite at altomail.com.
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