How it works
How a Unified Inbox Works: Connect Every Email Account, AI Sorts the Rest
Three steps, about five minutes, no migration. You add each mailbox over IMAP, the AI starts reading mail as it lands, and you work from one board instead of five logins.
In short
A unified inbox works by connecting to each of your mailboxes over IMAP, the standard protocol every major email provider speaks, and pulling all of their messages onto one board. Your mail is not moved or copied away from you: it keeps living at Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, or your own domain, and the unified inbox reads it in place. Archiving on the board syncs straight back to the provider, so cleanup you do here is real cleanup at the mailbox. Inboxes adds one step on top: as each message arrives, an AI model reads it, assigns a category, and decides whether it is spam, so the board is sorted before you open it.
The setup
Three steps from five logins to one board
> connecting your mailboxes over IMAP
Connect your mailboxes
Add each account with its IMAP server and credentials: Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Zoho, GMX, your own domain, anything that speaks IMAP with an app password. Add as many as your plan allows. Inboxes reads them; your mail keeps living on your own provider.
> AI categorizing + flagging spam
AI sorts every message
As mail arrives, AI reads it and assigns a category and a spam verdict. Every message lands as Important, Newsletter, Notification, Spam, or Other, and junk is flagged, so the unified board you open is already triaged instead of a raw pile.
> one board, threaded and in sync
Work from one board
Read, tag, thread, and search across every connected account from a single view. New mail is pulled in continuously and archiving is written back to the server, so the cleanup you do here is real cleanup at the mailbox itself.
Under the hood
What connecting over IMAP actually means
The mechanism matters, because it decides what happens to your mail. Here is exactly what a connection does and does not do.
Your mail stays where it is
Nothing is migrated, exported, or deleted. Your messages keep living in your Gmail, iCloud, or own-domain mailbox exactly as they do now. Inboxes reads them in place and shows them on a shared board.
Archiving syncs back
Archive a message on the board and it is moved to the matching folder at the provider, so the cleanup you do here is real cleanup. Replies go out over SMTP from your own address, but we do not write a copy into that account's Sent folder, and read state is not pulled back after a message is imported.
Any provider that speaks IMAP
Which is nearly all of them: Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Zoho, GMX, Fastmail, and mail on a domain you own. You are not limited to the two providers a given app decided to support. The exception is Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, which we cannot connect: Microsoft has retired the app-password login we authenticate with.
You can leave without losing anything
Because your mail never left your provider, disconnecting an account removes it from the board and changes nothing in the mailbox itself. There is no lock-in to engineer your way out of.
Shared inboxes
Group your mailboxes the way you actually work
Coming from Gmail this is the part with no equivalent, so here it is plainly: a shared inbox is a named board that several mailboxes feed into. You decide which mailboxes go on which board.
A worked example
Say you run three products. Each has a support@ address customers write to, and an app@ address that only sends receipts and alerts.
Put all three support@ mailboxes on one board and call it whatever makes sense to you. Now every customer email across all three products is one list, sorted, in front of you. Put the three noisy app@ mailboxes on a second board and set it to check once a day, so it stays out of your way until you want it.
Switching boards is one click. Moving a mailbox from one board to another is one click. Nothing is fixed: rename boards, add new ones, or drop a mailbox somewhere else whenever the work changes.
Each board keeps its own rhythm
Set how often a board checks for mail: every minute for the one customers write to, once a day for the automated noise, or only when you press Sync. You choose per board, in the panel.
Rules can follow the grouping
A rule you write can apply everywhere, to one board, or to a single mailbox. So “anyone pitching us services goes to spam” can cover everything, while “questions about cancelling get this answer” applies only to the product it belongs to.
One login, no colleagues
Inboxes is single-user. There is no way to invite a teammate, share a board, or assign a message to someone else. If a colleague wants this too, they sign up separately and pay their own subscription, and the two accounts never meet.
The sorting
Then the AI reads every message that lands
This is the part a plain email client does not do. Instead of you writing filter rules, a model reads each message and decides what it is.
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A category per message. Important, Newsletter, Notification, Spam, or Other, assigned from the content of the mail, across every connected account at once.
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A spam decision per message. Junk and phishing are flagged on what the message says, catching things a provider filter tuned for global volume lets through to you.
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Threads kept intact per mailbox. Replies are stitched back onto the conversation they belong to inside the mailbox that received them, so a thread reads in order instead of as scattered rows.
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Used only to sort your mail. The model categorizes and flags. We do not train models on your mail and we do not use it for advertising.
After the first sync
What the first week looks like
Day one: everything lands
Your accounts sync and the board fills in with the 25 most recent messages in each mailbox's inbox, categorized as they are read. It is a sorted view of what is arriving now, not a backfill: older mail and anything you already archived or filed into other folders stays where it is on your provider. See how to create a unified inbox if you want the concept first.
Correct anything it gets wrong
The category on every message is a dropdown in the reading pane: pick any of the five and the board re-files it. A model that reads meaning is right far more often than a filter rule, but it is not infallible, and nothing flagged as spam is deleted: it is set aside where you can see it.
Then stop checking five inboxes
The habit is the last thing to change. Once the board is the place mail arrives sorted, the other logins stop being somewhere you go. That is the whole point of keeping every account in one place.