MailSynth v1 Launch

We have a problem to solve.

Somewhere in the early-to-mid 2010s we really took a wrong turn. In 2022, technology critic and author Cory Doctorow coined the term "Enshittification" to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominate our daily lives seem to be getting worse at the same time.

A few years earlier in 2019, comedian-philosopher Bo Burnham put it even more bluntly:

"They're coming for every second of your life... We used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into, and that's where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. Now they're trying to colonize every minute of your life."

Having worked at technology companies small and large we can verify: everything is about engagement.

Time-on-site. Daily active users. Open rates. Scroll depth. "Session length." The entire game is: how do we keep you here longer, see more stuff, click more things?

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this.

When “Earthrise” (that famous Apollo-era photograph of our fragile blue planet hanging in the void) spread across the world, it shifted the ethos of the early computing era. As Walter Isaacson notes, it helped nudge the tech community away from Cold War-style engineering bravado toward a belief that digital tools could serve humanity, protect the planet, and knit people together. In other words, the original dream of computers and the internet was the exact opposite of enshittification.

Instead, we got:

Infinite feeds tuned to make you angry or addicted
“Notifications” that are mostly ads
Products that start delightful and slowly rot into upsells and dark patterns

And at the very center of all of that chaos, quietly getting worse every year: your inbox.

The inbox is where it hurts most

Email is still the nervous system of your life online.

Roughly 376+ billion emails are sent and received every day worldwide, up about 23% from 2020.
Gmail alone has 1.8+ billion users and handles over 121 billion emails a day.
90% of Americans are subscribed to at least one newsletter; many are on more.
Platforms like Beehiiv report newsletter sends jumping from 402 million to 4.5 billion in just a couple of years — an 11x increase — and a 700% increase in newsletters on the platform in 2023 alone.

And that’s before AI really pours gasoline on the fire.

It’s not just “a lot of email.” It’s a lot of unstructured, high-friction noise competing with a very small number of things that actually matter to your life:

The flight confirmation for tomorrow
The bill that’s about to be overdue
The one email from a friend buried under 200 promo blasts
The important update from your kid’s school mixed in with 14 “just checking in” SaaS drips

One survey found that 67% of people feel overwhelmed by their inbox. We think the 33% are the weird ones.

If you have ADHD (like we do), this isn’t just “annoying.” It’s paralyzing. You open Gmail intending to do one specific thing, and 40 minutes later you’ve:

Opened 12 other tabs
Signed up for something you didn’t need
Still not done the original task

How we want to fix it (by going backwards, in a good way)

AI, as it’s currently being used, is mostly making this worse: more auto-generated content, more cheap newsletters, more automated “touchpoints” landing in your inbox.

We want to do the exact opposite.

Our goal with MailSynth is simple:

Use AI to undo the damage AI (and the last decage of growth-hacked tech) is doing to your attention.

Instead of trying to keep you inside an app, MailSynth exists to:

Reduce the cognitive load of your digital life
Organize and maintain your systems for you
Protect your attention so you can spend more of your time in the real world

We’re starting with the place where the damage is most visible and measurable: your primary life database — Gmail.

And we’re starting with the people who’ve been hit hardest by this mess: folks with ADHD and other attention differences, though we fully expect what we’re building to be useful for anyone who’s tired of sorting digital trash all day.

v1

After almost a year of building, testing, breaking, listening, rebuilding, getting feedback from ADHD coaches and psychologists, and polishing…

👉 We’re launching MailSynth v1.

This is our first step toward helping ADHD people (and anyone else who wants to do less digital admin) get organized, stay organized, and free up time and energy for actual life.

In v1, MailSynth’s core job is straightforward:

Clean, organize, and maintain clarity in your Gmail — automatically.

Most people now receive email 24/7 from:

Purchases and receipts
Newsletters (which have exploded thanks to platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and LinkedIn)
Product updates and “engagement” campaigns
Financial accounts
Random log-in confirmations and alerts

With AI, we can only expect this flood to grow — especially from automated senders and spam.

What MailSynth actually does

MailSynth (and your seal assistant-mascot, Ada) uses Google Gemini 3 plus our own custom architecture to:

Understand how you use Gmail
- We look at what you open, what you ignore, what you archive, what you star, and how you’ve (maybe) tried to organize things in the past.
- We learn your real priorities, not just what the average “power user” does.
Propose a saner, ADHD-friendly organization system
- Using patterns from ADHD coaches and psychologists we work with, we suggest changes that reduce decision fatigue instead of adding more rules.
- Think fewer, clearer categories instead of “400 labels you never consistently use.”
Continuously maintain your inbox and labels
- New emails get routed into a system that makes sense for your brain and your life.
- Promotions and low-grade noise are filtered out or bundled.
- High-impact messages (time-sensitive, money-related, relationships, health, etc.) are surfaced so they’re hard to miss.
Handle the sludge: unsubscribes & slop-removal
- You should not be spending your finite attention hunting for tiny “unsubscribe” links.
- Ada helps identify repeat offenders, bulk noise, and low-value senders, and manages that junk so it stops owning your attention.
Give you a digest instead of a firehose
- You can opt into customizable email digests that pull out the important stuff in human-readable summaries:
  - Upcoming payments or renewals
  - Travel plans
  - Key updates from people you care about
  - A simple “report card” on what Ada has been doing to keep your system in shape
- Instead of checking Gmail 40 times a day, you get to skim a snapshot and move on.

Done right, MailSynth should make you feel:

Calmer when you open Gmail
More informed about the things that actually matter
Less distracted by random content
Less like a robot whose job is to sort digital trash all day

That’s v1. It’s intentionally narrow: nail Gmail organization and maintenance first, then expand outward.

Where we're going next

We’re nowhere near finished. Over the coming year, we’re working toward:

1. Gmail Extension, Calendar, Drive, and Tasks integration

Your inbox is just one slice of your life system. We know Google will help you sync things, we know they will ship some features that does some of what we do, but we will specialize in giving you an organizational system that keeps you from shifting things around.

All of this has to be done in a way that respects ADHD brains: fewer tabs, fewer “tools to manage tools,” more quietly handled in the background.

2. Doubling down on “life outside your phone”

Everything we build will be evaluated against one simple rule:

Does this help you stay organized so you can enjoy life outside your phone/computer?

If a feature makes you spend more time fiddling with settings, dashboards, and widgets, we either redesign it or kill it. There will be no productivity theater. There will be no tools designed for engagement-maxxing.

What we do not do, and will not do

This part matters a lot.

We are fundamentally opposed to using AI to:

Ghost-write messages as you and send them without your involvement
Generate fake “human-like” content that pretends to be you talking
Further blur the line between genuine human communication and algorithmic slop

There are many companies working hard to ensure you don’t have to spend any time or effort communicating with other human beings. We will not be one of them.

We’re not here to help you send more noise. We’re here to:

Filter out the slop
Protect your attention
Make real human communication easier to see and act on

If you’re looking for AI that fights other AI and removes junk from your inbox and your life, not AI that impersonates you and adds to the pile, you’re in the right place.

Join us: Less Inbox, More Outside

MailSynth v1 is just our first step, but the direction is non-negotiable:

Away from engagement-at-all-costs
Away from enshittified, attention-fracking interfaces
Toward tools that quietly do their job and then get out of your way

If you’re tired of feeling like an unpaid email janitor — especially if you’ve got ADHD and the modern internet feels like a hostile environment — we built this for you first.

Come help us shape what comes next.