Cora and Time Shifted Email

For the past two months, I’ve been using Cora, a website that connects to your Gmail and handles all of your email for you. Cora automatically organizes, labels, and archives your email. It then sends you a morning and afternoon digest with your emails to review.

It’s been a while since I can remember getting excited about an email product (Superhuman? Mailbox?), and email is a space that seems ripe for rethinking with the relatively new access to AI tools. I eagerly signed up for the waitlist, and got access to Cora.

Time-Shifted Email

When I started using Cora I recognized that it was in a lot of ways very similar to time-shifted reading apps like Instapaper. Instead of attempting to read/review each item as it comes in, there’s a place where they get stored, and then consumption happens all at once…. later.

My first impression using Cora was extremely high. I am an aspiring inbox-zero person, and I usually have about a dozen emails in my inbox at a time that are things I need to follow-up on eventually. I found that Cora eliminated the burden of a constant influx of emails into my inbox, and allowed me to analyze/manage my emails in bulk at specific periods of the day.

However, over the past few months I’ve experience enough gaps and pain points with Cora that I’m removing it from my workflow.

Missed Emails

Cora does not delete any emails, but I’ve found that by having most emails skip the inbox I’ve been completely missing important emails. Here’s just a few samples over the past 2 months:

• Daughter’s daycare invoice
• Common charges needed to pay for my neighbor
• Coordinating a meeting with someone who provided times ¹

I’ll admit that some of this is a human/me problem. That said, when you take every email and time-shift it for processing later, the person reading it is far, far more likely to hyper-skim the digest. The result where you miss important emails feels inevitable.

I do think an area Cora can improve is to stop trying to handle every email. Cora could do a lot better in differentiating unimportant, non-time-sensitive email from critically important and time-sensitive emails ².

Some of the most frustrating experiences have been when I’m actively in an email exchange with someone, and Cora time-shifts that email such that I’m either not timely in a response or miss the response altogether.

Digest Pileups

I went on vacation in early March. While on the one hand I was super happy to have Cora time-shift my emails during vacation, on the other I was super unhappy to come back to this experience:

Each of these digests has a “View Brief” button that takes you to the Cora website for viewing the digest. Going through your email like this is worse than just dealing with the emails as they come in ³.

On reflection, I could have also just gone to the “All Mail” tab in Gmail and navigated through a week’s worth of email. Not sure that’s much better.

Low-Quality Drafts

Cora attempts to draft email responses for you. I’ve found they’re pretty terse, impersonal, and usually not appropriate as a reply. In addition to that, it often drafts responses to email I would not personally reply to, like this invitation from the political campaign of a NYC-mayoral candidate to host a trivia night:

More bothersome than the bad drafts, which I usually wholesale delete when I do need to reply, is the mess it makes of your draft tab. I recently tried to go back to a draft I was working on, and it was buried under a bunch of other drafts Cora had attempted.

Lack of Integration into Email

A big challenge I’ve had with Cora is how unintegrated it is into email. It works in the background, archives your email, and then emails you a digest which links to the website.

From the website, there is a feed of all of your emails. The feed is segmented by category, and uses different information architecture for each section which makes scanning more difficult.

For example, in the Newsletter section below you can see the email subject is at the top and the sender is below. When scanning this my first thought is “which app is in testing?”

From the feed, you can open each email within the website, return the email to your inbox, or unsubscribe from the email. The unsubscribe function seems to only work within Cora itself, and doesn’t actually unsubscribe you from the email (just filters within Cora).

The biggest pain point with the website flow is on mobile. I’m periodically logged out of Cora from the Gmail in-app browser, requiring me to re-authenticate with Google sign in, which usually results in me just not reviewing digests on my phone/over the weekend ⁴.

Learnings

My biggest takeaway from using Cora is that 95% of the email I receive is trash. It’s unimportant stuff that takes my time and attention, and I should really aggressively unsubscribe from all the newsletters and things I think I want but actually do not. It’s obvious in hindsight but until using Cora I didn’t really appreciate that.

I also think time-shifted email will be a major, standard flow in the future, though I suspect the execution will be far more integrated directly into the email client versus separating the consumption into a separate website and dealing with the clunky flows that result.

I’ll be happy to try Cora again if/when these issues get resolved. If you’re building in the space, I’d be interested in trying your products, too!