Mission control for a busy inbox: Tidy Inbox and Recap

Some mornings the inbox looks like a launch pad after liftoff. Smoke everywhere, hundreds of unread messages, three accounts all shouting at once. Somewhere in there are the four or five emails that actually matter. The trick is finding them without reading everything else first.

Newton has two features built for exactly that moment. Tidy Inbox clears the noise out of the way. Recap tells you what still needs you. Used together, they turn a busy inbox into a short, calm list.

Tidy Inbox: clear the launch pad

A lot of what lands in your inbox was never meant for you personally. Promotions, newsletters, social notifications. None of it is urgent, and all of it competes for your attention.

Tidy Inbox moves that mail out of your Inbox and into a separate view called Low Priority. On a Gmail account, you choose whether Promotions and Social mail go there. On an Outlook account, it's the mail Outlook files under Other in Focused Inbox.

A few things make it easy to trust:

• Nothing is deleted. Low Priority mail is still there whenever you want it. Nothing changes in Gmail itself.
• People stay in your Inbox. If any message in a conversation isn't low priority, such as a reply from a person, the whole conversation stays in your Inbox.
• It stays quiet. Low Priority mail doesn't send notifications. When it has unread mail, a small bar at the top of your Inbox tells you how many.
• You get the final say. If Newton files a sender in the wrong place, move one of their emails to Inbox or to Low Priority and Newton remembers it for that sender from then on. On Outlook, that choice updates Focused Inbox too, so Outlook on the web follows along.

Tidy Inbox works on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android. Gmail and Outlook accounts added since September 10, 2026 start with it switched on. For iCloud, Yahoo and other IMAP accounts, mail isn't sorted automatically, but you can still choose Move to Low Priority for any sender.

To set it up, open Settings, go to Supercharge, then Tidy Inbox, and pick your account. The full steps are in Tidy Inbox and Low Priority.

Recap: your daily flight plan

Tidy Inbox makes the Inbox quieter. Recap answers a different question: of everything in there, what needs me today?

Once a day, at the time you choose, Newton looks through your recent mail across your personal accounts and builds a short list. Each conversation appears once, in one of four groups:

• Waiting on you. Someone wrote to you in the last two weeks and is waiting for your reply.
• No reply yet. You asked someone to reply, decide or send something, and they haven't answered in 3 to 14 days.
• Coming up. An email from the past week mentions a date, like a booking or a due date, and it's getting close.
• Starred, still open. You starred it, and the other person sent the last message.

Every group comes with a short line explaining why it's there, such as "Sam is waiting for your reply". No guessing about why an email made the list.

Then you work through it. Mark an email Done once it's handled, or Later to bring it back in two days. On your phone, swipe right for Done and left for Later. Replying to, archiving or deleting an email in Newton marks it Done for you, so the list keeps up with you instead of the other way around.

On desktop, open Recap from the sidebar or press 0. On your phone, it's in the menu, and Recap can send you one notification a day. Recap is off until you turn it on, and it needs Newton Pro. Find out more in What is Recap? and Set up Recap.

Better together

Here's how the two work as a pair on a busy Monday.

Overnight, Tidy Inbox has already moved the weekend's promotions and social updates into Low Priority, without a single notification. Your Inbox holds the mail from people. Then Recap pulls out the handful of threads that need action: the client waiting on an answer, the proposal nobody has replied to, the flight on Thursday.

You handle those first. The rest of the Inbox can wait until you're ready, and Low Priority can wait until the evening, or the weekend, or never. Houston, we have a plan.

Start your countdown

If you already use Newton, open Settings, go to Supercharge, and turn on Tidy Inbox and Recap. If you're new here, see Newton's plans and give your inbox a quieter orbit.