The old Pinterest board also does email and Extensions – and it’s great

When was the last time you had an email? If you’re older, maybe in 2004, when Gmail was first released beta invitation. If you are young, maybe not at all. Over the years, many startups have tried and failed to reinvent it, with the most successful simply adding new functionality — such as better navigation or AI assistants — to the same basic box.

Today, a new company built by a group of former Pinterest designers and engineers is rethinking what an inbox can be from the ground up. And you can see that this is interesting.

Additional informationthe first product from a consumer technology company BuildForeverit ditches subject lines, folders, and tags in favor of an inbox organized around your life — bringing everything important into a single, actionable image within the “Today” tab. This page is updated in real time with the latest and most important information gathered from the mountains of email in your inbox.

The rest of your inboxes are simply organized into groups that turn into tabs, showing your life based on what’s already in your inbox. This means you can have tabs for family events, travel plans, finances, newsletters, and more. The results of the checked box are also special – and you feel like you have the opportunity to be on top of everything.

The idea, like many in the shopping space, came from a personal problem that the founder wanted to solve: His inbox was confusing.

“I was a religious person every day (at work) … you’re always looking at this email. Then I opened my email, and it was a wall of activity. And with all the junk in there, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, where do I start?'” explains BuildForever co-founder and CEO, Naveen Gavinia former SVP and chief marketing officer at Pinterest who worked at the consumer company for nearly 12 years.

“Honestly, after 12 hours of emailing each other all day, I just didn’t have the energy, so I just gave up.”

As a result, she tells TechCrunch, she has missed messages, unknown friends, and the feeling of being buried. He believes the problem is chronic: As emails pile up, important things just fall on the page and get forgotten.

Further attempts to change this paradigm are new email features, and, under the hood, AI intelligence. In particular, the group does not classify Additions as an AI program, and on purpose.

“I think, in Silicon Valley, people are very deep into (AI), but I think the average person doesn’t know where to start,” Gavini says. “When you say AI, it’s like ‘powerful, user-y.’ Also, I can only imagine that there are many companies that promise to be your AI life support. And I think people don’t really want that. People just want some of these problems to be solved,” he says.

“That’s what we’re focused on — solving user problems, versus putting in the next AI that can do anything.”

And yet, something like Add-on wouldn’t be an AI technology that silently learns, understands, and organizes your box for you. On top of these background notifications, there’s also an AI assistant you can talk to to help you find emails, unsubscribe, reply with your voice, and more.

Instead of just starting in the inbox, in Additions, you start on “Today”. This page represents everything that’s happening in your inbox that you need to pay attention to, and it’s organized into categories that require action, what’s happening today, and what’s “good to know.” You can do things as a to-do list, where you can swipe to remove the item when you’re done.

For each action, Add-ons tries to predict the next steps you need to take and highlights them for you, whether it’s a file you need to open and review, a link you need to click, or anything else.

Below are “Good to Know” items, such as order and delivery confirmations, test results from your last doctor’s appointment, and selected news headlines from your daily newsletter.

Under the Today tab is the “Daily Cleanup” section, where Add-ons allow you to review the lowest number of emails that have cluttered your inbox and allow you to take action. From here, you can choose to unsubscribe from marketing emails and updates you don’t want, and Add-ons also gives you the option to remove all emails from that sender from your inbox, saving you storage space.

Otherwise, you can simply mark the emails as archived, which will also appear in your Gmail. (Currently, Extra only works with Gmail, but that may change in the future. The company may offer its own email addresses at some point.)

In addition to a short daily section on the Today tab, newsletter subscribers will have a place to browse topics by their favorite authors within a dedicated “News” tab. Here, Extras uses lots of pictures, headlines, and a bit of text to encourage you to read the whole story, just like the Apple News app would.

The “Events” page not only pulls up your schedules and plans from your email, but also shows events you might want to add to your calendar – like local events that appear through the local newsletter or emails from other places or organizations. And if you add something from these ideas to your calendar, Additions will understand the next step – like buying tickets for an upcoming concert – and show you what to do.

The “Shop” tab, on the other hand, reimagines shopping-related emails as a repository for fun finds, rather than a hassle. Add-ons use commercial images along with promotional information to get your attention.

“We go through your e-mails and make purchases, and we extract what you buy… And that’s a big difference in brands,” Gavini explains. In most cases, there’s a very small chance you’ll see a brand email, he says, because Gmail puts them in its own Ads section. But since this is the kind you want to hear, Additions presents the information in an attractive format that entices you to buy.

“What we’ve found is (that) giving people control over their inbox allows them to choose what they want to receive, so they can receive it in the best way for them to use it,” Gavini said.

Some tabs in the Extra program will be unique to you, giving you a place to read and save emails relevant to your life and activities, organized intelligently on your behalf. (There’s a traditional “inbox” view if you want it – but you can also move it to the end of the row if you feel it’s no longer useful.)

Additional beta testers have now unsubscribed more than 2 million emails a year, and more than 4 million emails have been converted to the “Today” summary, the company says.

Extra is now launching its app on iOS and online for those on the waiting list who will be able to invite others using special codes.

An email that is… fun to use?

In TechCrunch’s early testing, we were surprised to find the product pretty polished already, given its beta status at the time. The app is smartly designed, easy to use, and – dare I say it? – makes checking your inbox fun. (I’m as surprised as you are, trust me.)

I’m getting so much joy out of unsubscribing from all the junk that fills my inbox and deleting all the emails spammer marketer in the process. I feel accomplished by writing about what I’m doing that I’ve done. I’m finding the music I want to see and the new music I want to buy. I am doing things that I would otherwise miss. That’s what email would have been doing for me all this time, if it hadn’t been created by a bunch of engineers who spend their time arguing. A good shade of blue for links.

There is still room for improvement, but my thoughts so far have focused on small changes, not big ones.

BuildForever was founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Pereta, both of whom also spent more than a decade at Pinterest. The main idea is to combine their technical and design skills to develop high-quality consumer applications, starting with email.

“If we could bring the same design and feel of Pinterest — which is fun, exciting, and inspiring — to something as stressful and boring as email, that was our goal,” says Gavini.

The company hopes to expand its strategy to other products over time, possibly including messaging, calendars, communication, and more.

BuildForever is funded by $9.5 million in seed funding led by Comments, A* (Kevin Hartz), Blessedand Sold by Gil. Other angel invest includes Pinterest co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp; Gmail creator Paul Buchheit; OpenAI works CEO Fidji Simo; Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra; Pinterest and Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram; A24 contributor Scott Belsky; Divisional CEO Shreya Murthy; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; and others.

The add-on is free to use and will be free, with plans to generate revenue in the future. I am available online and iOS.