Introducing Cora: Manage Your Inbox With AI
Get delivered from email with our latest product incubation
December 17, 2024
We all dread email.
So we built an entirely new way to manage your inbox with AI: Cora.
Cora untethers you from your inbox by turning your email into a sleek, scannable story that you can scroll through twice a day.
It gives you the bottom line instead of the back and forth, so you can get through your email and get on with your day—no archiving required.
When you use Cora:
- Your inbox only contains email from humans that need a response.
- Cora automatically drafts replies to common requests (in your voice!).
- Twice a day, you get a beautiful brief that summarizes everything you received.
Most email clients deliver email to you. Let Cora deliver you from email.
We’re onboarding people every day. Join the waitlist to experience the most human way to do email:
(We’re onboarding new people every day. Every paid subscribers get priority. Subscribe!)
Why build Cora?
A few months ago, Every entrepreneur in residence Kieran Klaassen, Every Studio head Brandon Gell, and I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and asked ourselves:
If we were designing email from scratch in a world with ChatGPT and Claude (instead of Clippy), how would it work?
What we realized is this:
90% of the emails we get don’t require a response.
So then why do we have to read them one by one in the order they came in? And why—in an age where inboxes are filled with purchase confirmations, newsletters, deal negotiations, client requests, calendar invitations, and messages from Mom—is every email treated the same way?
The answer is because every email client you’ve ever used was built before generative AI.
That’s where Cora came from. We’ve turned email on its head. The idea isn’t to get through every email as quickly as possible. It’s to turn your inbox into a more human place—one reserved only for people that need your attention. Then it’s to summarize everything else for you twice a day, so you can get out of your inbox and on to the rest of your life.
I’ll be honest: It’s a weird experience. Cora completely changes your relationship to your email. It forces you to reckon with how much time you spend monitoring your inbox when you could be doing other things. You start to realize how much of the email you see isn’t worth dealing with as they come in one by one, and how much inbox overwhelm was caused by email that was mostly noise.
At first this is uncomfortable. But over time it begins to feel freeing—and you’d never go back.
How does it work?
Cora makes sure you only see emails that need a reply
When you get a time-sensitive email, it will pop up in your inbox immediately. We’ve built Cora with the power to determine what’s important for you, personally, to see—so you know you’ll always get it on time.
Everything else? Cora automatically archives it, so when you open your inbox, everything you see actually requires your attention.
You can also get through what’s there a lot more quickly—because Cora gives you a head start with drafting.
Cora drafts emails to common requests
Everyone gets repetitive emails. Cora automatically drafts a few possible responses to those emails in your voice, tone, and style. Here’s a real example from my inbox:
Cora will never send an email for you—you control what you send to whom and when—but we’ve found that drafts save you from repetitive typing. Here’s how it works:
When you sign up for Cora, it looks through a selection of your historical email to understand you better.
First, it automatically uncovers how you write. It will note that you like to use exclamation marks to end your sentences when you’re talking to family, and that you tend to be direct and clear when you’re in a professional context.
It will know if you cc your assistant or use a Calendly to schedule meetings—and it will automatically insert the link if needed. It will detect common phrases you use to begin or sign off, and knows which types of people you usually use them with.
Then, it looks for repetitive emails you get every day, like common customer service or meeting scheduling requests from colleagues. When it finds one, it will write a draft for you to review and send if you so choose.
Cora sends you a beautiful brief twice daily
Twice a day—once in the morning and once in the afternoon—Cora sends you a beautiful brief that summarizes all of your non-time-sensitive emails.
Here’s a real screenshot of one of my briefs from last week:
All screenshots courtesy of the author.
At the top of the brief, Cora tells you the most important things you need to know and makes it easy to take action if you need to.
For example, if someone on your team needs a signature, that piece of information shows up at the top of your brief, with a convenient button that lets you go to DocuSign in one click:
It shows you a beautiful calendar readout that summarizes all of your scheduled meetings, meeting requests, and RSVPs:
If you don’t have time to review an action item, rather than marking it as unread, you can turn it into a to-do item by clicking “Add to-do”:
Cora maintains a to-do list that you can manage directly in the app, available both on desktop and the mobile web:
Cora also includes summaries of all of your payments so you can see how your money is flowing at a glance:
It even summarizes your newsletters. It will pull out interesting stories and list their sources, so you can discover new things in your inbox that you might have previously missed:
You can customize Cora completely
Cora lets you customize everything about it with your own prompts—so you can tell it what to brief, what to respond to, what’s timely, and how to categorize what comes into your inbox.
If, for example, you want to see investment pitches in one place, you can easily ask Cora to collect them for you:
Cora will then collect them and display them in your next brief:
If an email is briefed into the wrong category, you can change it:
Of course, email services have long
given you the ability to
categorize
your emails, but Cora is different, because it allows you to
prompt
your emails. You can write plain-language rules that tell Cora how to organize your inbox. This is a far more powerful way to organize and display what comes into your inbox.
What comes next?
Cora is a full-blown product that we’re excited to launch in private beta today. It has a waitlist, and we’ll prioritize Every paid subscribers. Our intention is to eventually release it as both a standalone product and part of our Every paid subscription—which already includes all of the content we create and the products we incubate, like Spiral, Sparkle, and Lex.
To be totally transparent with you, Cora is currently expensive to run, so we’ll make a final decision on how the bundle option works once it’s out of beta.
Cora was built end-to-end by Every entrepreneur in residence Kieran Klaassen, who is now officially its general manager. Over the next several months, you’ll hear a lot more from Kieran in our Studio column, Source Code; on my podcast, AI & I; and in the product and feature updates we have planned.
It’s been truly incredible to partner with him on this product, and I can’t wait for you to see what we’ve built.
If you want to try Cora, sign up for the waitlist:
We’re onboarding new people every day, and we’re prioritizing Every paid subscribers. If you want to jump the waitlist, make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already:
Thanks so much for following along with everything we’re building here at Every. More soon.
P.S. Huge thanks to Darkroom for building Cora’s beautiful landing page in just a couple of days. They’re enormously talented, and we could not have done this without them.
Dan Shipper
is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the
column and hosts the podcast
.
You can follow him on X at
and on
, and Every on X at
and on
.
We also build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Write something great with Lex.