Edison Mail Assistant will make sure you won't miss meetings and flights

There has been no shortage of attempts to kill or at least overhaul email but, just like SMS, it will take a concerted effort from almost everyone who uses email to switch to something else. In the meantime, email continues to flood people's inboxes with a varied mix of content, sometimes causing important schedules and information to be buried and forgotten. Taking a cue from the trend in the tech industry, Edison Mail has updated its Assistant to do more than just manage receipts but be an even more useful secretary to remind you of things before, not after, they're due.

Many email clients these days have become more intelligent in determining the importance of certain emails. At the expense of taking a peek inside, clients can extract important dates and appointments, from meetings to package tracking. That still requires humans to remember to check specially-marked emails, which is where the new Edison Mail Assistant comes in.

The email app has long had an Assistant but its previous role, though important, was less urgent. It sorted emails on trips, receipts, and subscriptions and put them aside for later perusal. This time, it's sort of going the other direction and presenting more important and urgent information to the user, like flights and meeting emails they may have missed. The new Assistant lives in the upper right corner of the email app but that's not the only way it makes its presence felt.

Knowing full well that some users might not even tap on the Assistant to view such time-sensitive information, the Edison Mail app also puts that information at the bottom of the app's screen 24 hours before the event inside takes place. This ensures you really don't miss anything, even if you don't explicitly consult the Assistant.

The new and more proactive Assistant is part of Edison Mail's stronger push to bring its technologies to more email users. Just a few hours ago, it launched a Mac app, its first foray outside of mobile. Edison Mail is available for Android and iOS and supports a number of email accounts from Gmail to Yahoo to more generic IMAP support.