A few years ago, I managed to receive 1,000 emails between boarding a plane in San Francisco and landing in New Orleans five hours later. Maybe 40 of those 1,000 were emails that I needed to respond to, but given the overwhelming volume in my inbox, a lot of them ended up going unanswered. Filters help organize things a bit, but now a new email app is bringing in the big guns to tackle the problem: artificial intelligence. Called Astro, the app essentially offers many of the same features as previous aspiring inbox-zero apps. You can snooze messages you see so they surface at your convenience, mute particular senders, and set a priority inbox that surfaces those emails from VIP senders that otherwise might end up buried amid Bed Bath & Beyond coupons.

Called Astro, the app essentially offers many of the same features as previous aspiring inbox-zero apps. You can snooze messages you see so they surface at your convenience, mute particular senders, and set a priority inbox that surfaces those emails from VIP senders that otherwise might end up buried amid Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. What makes Astro different is how it creates that priority inbox. Just like other programs, you can designate people you'd like to prioritize. Astro takes care of that automatically by putting a few people in there based on whom you're chatting with on a regular basis.