The former Pinterest team is redesigning email with Extra — and it’s actually pretty good

When was the last time you got really excited about email? If you’re older, it probably dates back to 2004, when Gmail was rolling out its first experimental invitations. If you were younger, it probably would never happen. Over the years, many startups have tried and failed to reinvent it, with the most successful companies simply shoving new functionality — like improved workflows or AI agents — into the same basic inbox.

Today, a new company created by a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers is rethinking what an inbox is from the ground up. You might find this really exciting.

Extra, the first product from consumer technology company BuildForever, ditches subject lines, folders, and tags in favor of an inbox organized around your life — bringing together everything important into one actionable overview under the Today tab. This tab is updated in real time with the latest important information extracted from the mountains of email in your inbox.

The rest of your inbox is then automatically organized into custom categories that become tabs, reflecting your life as defined by what’s already in your inbox. This means you can have tabs for family activities, travel plans, finances, newsletters, and more. The result of this redesigned inbox is a personalized, unique experience — one where you finally feel like you have a chance to stay on top of everything.

The idea, like many ideas in the consumer space, grew out of a personal problem the founder wanted to solve: his inbox was a mess.

“I was getting a religious inbox with no one on a daily basis [at work] …You’re just constantly checking that email. And then I would open my personal email, and it was just a wall of to-dos. “And with all the junk, I was like, ‘Oh my God, where do I start?’” explains BuildForever co-founder and CEO Navin Gavini, a former senior vice president and chief product officer at Pinterest who has worked at the consumer technology company for nearly 12 years.

“Honestly, after 12 hours of emailing all day, I didn’t have the energy, so I quit.”

The result, he tells TechCrunch, was missed messages, unwittingly hidden friends, and a general feeling of burial. He believes the problem is structural: As emails pile up, important messages simply fall off the page and go into oblivion.

Extra is trying to change that paradigm with a brand new interface for email, and AI intelligence under the hood. It’s worth noting that the team isn’t promoting Extra as an AI app, and that’s intentional.

“I think people in Silicon Valley are very into this [AI]”But I think the average person doesn’t even know where to start,” Gaffini says. “When you mention AI, it kind of sounds like ‘power, user.’ But also, I think there are a lot of companies promising to be the intelligent personal assistant for your life. And I think people don’t really need that. People just want to solve some of these basic problems,” he says.

“That’s what we’re focused on: solving user problems, versus rolling out the next AI that can do everything.”

However, a product like Extra wouldn’t exist without AI technology that quietly learns, understands, and then organizes your inbox for you. On top of that smart backend, there’s also an AI assistant you can talk to to help find emails, unsubscribe, respond with your voice, and more.

Instead of starting in the traditional inbox interface, in Extra, you start in the Today view. This page represents everything in your inbox that you should care about, organized into categories for what needs action, what’s happening today, and what’s “good to know.” You can treat actionable items like a to-do list, where you can swipe to clear the item when it’s complete.

For each action item, Extra tries to predict the next steps you’ll need to take and then highlights them for you, whether it’s a file you need to open and review, a link you need to click, or something else.

Below are “good to know” items, such as order and shipping confirmations, test results from your last appointment with your doctor, and a selection of news headlines from your daily news briefing newsletters.

At the bottom of the Today tab is the Daily Cleanup section, where Extra lets you review low-priority emails that have cluttered your inbox and lets you take action. From here, you can choose to unsubscribe from marketing emails and updates you don’t want, and Extra also offers the option to delete all emails from that sender from your inbox, saving you storage space.

Otherwise, you can just mark emails as done to archive them, which is also reflected in your Gmail. (Right now, Extra only works with Gmail, but that may change in the future. The company will likely offer its own email addresses at some point.)

In addition to the daily summary section in the Today tab, newsletter subscribers will have a place to browse the titles of their favorite writers under a dedicated News tab. Here, Extra uses images, headlines, and extensive excerpts to encourage you to read the full article, much like the Apple News app does.

The Events tab not only pulls your appointments and plans from your email, but also suggests events you might want to add to your calendar — such as local events featured through local newsletters or emails from other places or organizations. If you add any of these suggestions to your personal calendar, Extra will understand the next step — such as purchasing tickets to the next concert — and suggest that action.

Meanwhile, the Shopping tab reimagines shopping-related emails as a curated storefront of interesting finds, rather than unwanted clutter. Extra uses product images along with promotional details to grab your attention.

“We’re actually going through emails and shopping, and extracting the products themselves… and that’s a really big difference for brands,” Gavini explains. He says there’s usually very little chance you’ll see a brand email, because Gmail buries it in its Promotions tab. But since these are the brands you want to listen to, Extra presents the information in a more engaging, clearer format that actually encourages you to shop.

“What we found is [that] Giving people control over their inbox allows them to decide what they want to receive, so they can receive it in the format that is most authentic and best for their consumption,” Gavini notes.

Other tabs in the Extra app will be unique to you, giving you a place to see and archive emails tailored to your life and activities, and intelligently organized on your behalf. (There’s a traditional “Inbox” view if you need it — but you can also move it to the end of the row if you find it’s no longer useful.)

Extra beta testers have now collectively unsubscribed from more than 2 million emails annually, and more than 4 million emails have been converted to Today show summaries, the company says.

Extra is now launching its app on iOS and web for those on its waitlist who will be able to invite others using special codes.

Fun email to use?

In TechCrunch’s initial tests, we were surprised to find the product was actually well polished, given its beta status at the time. The app has been carefully designed, easy to use, and – dare I say it? – Makes checking your inbox an almost enjoyable experience. (I’m as shocked as you are, believe me.)

I truly derive this happiness from unsubscribing from all the spam cluttering my inbox and clearing all emails from Spammers Marketer in this process. I feel accomplished when I mark my tasks as completed. I discover which concerts I want to see and new products I want to buy. I’m catching up on things I would normally miss. This is what email could have done for me all along, had it not been designed by a group of engineers who spent their time debating the perfect blue color for links.

There is room for improvement, but my comments so far have focused on small tweaks, not major issues.

BuildForever was co-founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Beretta, both of whom also spent more than a decade at Pinterest. The broader idea is to combine their engineering and design talent to fix the best consumer applications, starting with email.

“If we could bring the same kind of design and thought process of Pinterest — which is delight, joy, and inspiration — to something as worrying and boring as email, that was our goal,” Gavini says.

The company hopes to expand its approach to other products over time, including messaging, calendars, contacts, and more.

BuildForever is backed by $9.5M in seed funding led by Abstract, A* (Kevin Hartz), Felicis, and Elad Gil. Other angel investors include Pinterest founders Ben Silberman and Evan Sharp; Gmail creator Paul Bouchet; OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo; Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra; Pinterest and Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram; A24 partner Scott Belsky; Chief Executive Officer Shreya Murthy; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; And others.

Extra is free to use and will remain free, with plans to monetize it later. It’s available on the web and on iOS.