The Road To Zenith 1.0.5
Elevate Your Inbox
Features I Love About Zenith
A year and a half ago I had a vision of an app that would bring the AI tools I had used in Stratum to the email inbox.
It’s been a lot of work. I wasn’t sure I could do it because I just encountered problem after problem relating to IMAP and HTML. I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. And to tell you the truth halfway into the project I considered killing it. But I didn’t. I found a solution to my problems. And I’m glad I did because Zenith turned out way better than I could have imagined.
Because I made an email app I would like to use, I feel I successfully executed on my vision. When I set out to create Zenith I wanted the app to be Stratum for email. And somehow it has turned out even better than that.
Using Zenith is like having a personal assistant help you manage your email. This is the feeling I’m going for. I actually put this explicitly in my AI prompts.
The summary should be written from the point of view of a personal assistant. So they should usually be formatted like ‘X wants to tell you about Y’, ‘X is having a sale’, etc.
And it feels so good. Now I don’t want to use any other email apps because they don’t summarize the email, you have to manually read it which is just a ton of unnecessary work. With Zenith I just look at the summary.
It tells me everything I need to know. Then I can swipe it away without ever actually tapping through to view the whole email. Or if I do tap through I know what I’m looking for because I was primed by the summary so I can go through email faster with less work. It makes reading email so much more enjoyable.
Now I know that some other email apps have AI summaries that are, how should we say, not accurate. Well that’s because they use small on-device models. They probably use a 3 or 4B model, you just can’t get good results with that. I actually tried using Gemma 4B as a test, and the results are terrible. Zenith uses Gemini Flash which consistently delivers amazing results. The summaries are always accurate.
And the summaries could be getting even better. I’ve been playing around with Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite which I discussed in this post. It actually gives really good results. There is already an option in the app to enable the model. I suspect I will be enabling it for all users soon.
I also want to do some experiments with Mistral Small which I discussed in my post Towards A Sovereign Cloud. Also in case Google decides they want to jack up the price again.
The second thing I love is the bundling feature.
Now other apps have similar features but they all have problems. Some have too few bundles and others have bundles that feel a bit unnecessary or redundant. And some don’t group their bundles so it’s just visual clutter.
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Zenith early on fell into the trap of having too many bundles, but I solved that problem. There’s actually quite a bit of logic in the app to prevent ‘over-bundling’. And it works great now.
When you are in that updates bundle you are in the updates zone because you know all those bundles are about updates, usually newsletters. It makes it so you can really go through emails much faster. And your inbox is much cleaner.
Also worth noting is the presence of text-to-speech, TTS. Stratum has TTS, TTS queuing, and a TTS progress bar. So when I made Zenith I decided to just reuse that code. And bam, Zenith has all the same TTS capabilities of Stratum. A new app having features from previous apps? Isn’t that something.
I’m really excited for this. When I was developing Stratum I really loved it because I could make features that would make me more productive with RSS. And now with Zenith I can make features that make me more productive with email.
So for example there is an expired indicator for emails.
This indicates if an email is about a sale that is over. This probably won’t have much of an impact for people that have tidy inboxes but it is a really good indicator of what can be deleted. I also have a deadline indicator which is working and if an email has a deadline it will be marked. Although it’s still in the experimental stage. Perhaps in the future you will see all your important emails sorted by due date.
And lastly there are robust anti-spam features I built in. There is an easy unsubscribe button:
Sure, other apps allow you to unsubscribe. But then they leave all the emails in your inbox. What’s up with that? Zenith allows you to delete all of them. It makes my inbox much tidier.
Also there are robust blocking systems in the app allowing you to block senders or entire domains. I used this a lot earlier in Zenith’s development. Not anymore though. And the reason is that I implemented a spam detection API.
It’s really great, it seems to have a 100% success rate in identifying spam as far as I can tell. Both in true positives and true negatives. I’ve been looking at the results from the API and I’ve been waiting for it to mess up. Maybe it will, but it hasn’t yet.
Now if you’re a Gmail user you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Because Gmail’s spam filters are incredibly aggressive. But some other email providers I use are not as good about managing spam and Zenith supports multiple accounts in a unified inbox.
Oh, that’s another thing. Because Zenith uses IMAP, not the Gmail API it works with many different email services. And not only that, but you can also view all your emails in one unified inbox, which I call the ‘hub’. Originally I called it the Unibox but I never liked that name, especially as there’s an app called Unibox.
So no more having to go to each email provider individually. It’s all in one place now.
So that’s Zenith 1.0.5. It’s the culmination of that dream I had a year and a half ago and I’m really proud of what I was able to make. Give it a try. The app is available on Android and iOS (and Apple Silicon Macs).
