Former Pinterest Team Reinvents Email With Extra App

When's the last time you felt excited about email? For most of us, our inboxes feel like endless to-do lists we'll never conquer.

But a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers just launched Extra, an app that completely reimagines how email works. And people are actually calling it exciting.

Extra replaces the traditional inbox with a "Today" view that shows only what matters right now. Instead of drowning in hundreds of unread messages, you see a clean summary of what needs action, what's happening today, and what's good to know.

The app was born from founder Naveen Gavini's personal frustration. After 12 years as Pinterest's chief product officer, he could keep his work inbox at zero but couldn't face his personal email. "I would open up my personal email, and it was just this wall of to-dos," he explains.

The result was missed messages and unintentionally ghosted friends. Sound familiar?

Extra uses AI to automatically organize your inbox into custom tabs based on your actual life. You might see tabs for family activities, travel plans, finances, or newsletters, all created by learning what's already in your inbox.

But here's what makes it different from other AI email apps: the team isn't pitching it as an AI product at all. "People don't really need the AI personal assistant for your life," Gavini says. "People just want some of these basic problems solved."

The app treats actionable items like a to-do list you can swipe away when complete. It predicts your next steps and highlights the files you need to open or links you need to click.

Why This Inspires

What's refreshing about Extra is how it tackles a universal problem we've all accepted as unsolvable. For years, we've blamed ourselves for inbox chaos, when really the tools weren't built for how we actually live.

The app also includes a daily cleanup feature that helps you unsubscribe from unwanted emails and delete old messages to free up storage. Everything syncs with Gmail, so changes appear in both places.

Newsletter subscribers get a dedicated News tab with wide images and headlines that make reading enjoyable again. It's designed to feel less like work and more like catching up on what you care about.

Right now Extra only works with Gmail, but the team is exploring other email providers and may eventually offer its own email addresses.

After two decades of failed attempts to fix email, someone finally built something that feels like progress.