AOL wants to save you from email overload with Alto

Remember when you exiting to hear this sound. You got mail. Well this days you've got too much mail and AOL is back with the plan to help sure to the mess with an app called ALTO. Here's the concept, ALTO pulls in your emails from multiple account it can be AOL, YAHOO, GMAIL even your work exchange, and it is scan your emails for keywords to automatically filter the miss categories. That way you can just see emails with a photo, or just see emails with a file attachment. There are also filters for shopping, travel, finance and social media. The dream of an empty inbox is dead. So AOL sees the next solution for email as being able to organize it all without you needing to do anything. The concept sounds great but, an early demo I tried had some hiccups. Anything with the word ticket or reservation went into travel. Even a yoga class I reserved. But it did not pick up on the hotel reservation email reservation my husband forwarded me. And for some reason some sort of crockpot recipe spam was showing up in travel. A scenic colleague noticed similar issues with his test. Anything with the word subscribe of shipment was going into his shopping filter, including a news alert for a crime story, but there's a second part to the app that also has some cool potential It's called Dashboard. It highlights important incoming alerts for things like flights, hotels, car rentals, and package shipment into a deck of cards. It's just like Google now except you don't need Gmail. The app's creator said in an interview That this could also highlight coupons or sales that may be expiring soon. If Alto sounds familiar that's because it should. AOL originally launched Alto Mail three years ago as a way to manage multiple emails from a single website. But with an invite only launch and no mobile app, It flopped and went nowhere. This is a reboot that focuses more on highlighting those emails that may be important to you. That is if it can be smart enough to fish out the right emails. That's it for this tech news update. I'm Bridget Carey. You can stay on top of the biggest stories at cnet.com/update.