The first thing every investor said was that email clients are a graveyard. They are not wrong. The list of well-funded, beautifully designed, thoroughly dead mail apps is long.
The graveyard is full of interface projects
Almost all of them competed on interface. Faster keyboard shortcuts, prettier threads, a better snooze. Those are real improvements, and none of them change how much thinking an inbox demands from you.
An interface improvement makes a heavy inbox pleasant. It does not make it lighter.
What changed underneath
What changed is that a model small enough to run on a laptop is now good enough to read a message and be right about what it is. That was not true four years ago, and it moves the problem from presentation to comprehension.
If the client understands the mail, it can do the sorting, hold the context, and draft the obvious reply. The interface stops being the product and goes back to being an interface.
Where we are
Parrot is used every day by people running four and five accounts, which is the hardest version of this problem and the one we built for first. We are a small team, we are not in a hurry to be a large one, and the roadmap is mostly things our heaviest users asked for twice.
Parrot Mail