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The inbox as we know it hasn’t changed a lot in the past three decades. The basics have remained pretty much the same since that CD with 30 free hours of AOL showed up in mailboxes in the late 1990s: Log into your inbox, and you’ll see all of your emails, presented in reverse chronological order.
There have, however, been notable changes in how users interact with their inboxes. The rise of mobile email meant that many people checked email hourly, or more often, instead of just when sitting at their computer. Notifications let users know, without logging in, if they had a new email waiting. And Gmail’s introduction of the tabbed inbox started to separate email from priority senders — family, friends, colleagues, the newsletters you really love — from the rest of your incoming mail.
The newsletter world has changed in a big way, too. A decade ago, most publishers used email to send out what was essentially an RSS feed of their most recently published stories. There were some exceptions from digital-first outlets like Politico or TheSkimm, but email was seen largely as a marketing tool for publishers. These days, media outlets invest significant resources in newsletters, having realized their potential for engagement and revenue, while the creator space has brought exciting new voices to inboxes.
But for the first time since the rise of mobile email, and perhaps since email went mainstream 30 years ago, the inbox is about to change in a significant way.
We’re entering the age of the AI-powered inbox.
Here’s what’s coming:
- Inboxes will use AI to make your inbox a lot more searchable.
- Providers like Gmail will quickly summarize long emails or newsletters.
- AI will be able to sort through your inbox, help you identify emails that need a reply or your attention, and automatically filter out the emails that you’re not interested in. It’ll even provide a summary of action items — it’s like a personal assistant who can tell you what to prioritize every time you log in.
- And soon, thanks to built-in AI tools and third-party AI agents, even the average user will be able to let AI reply to emails or draft the first version of a reply, all in your voice.
Some of these features, like a more searchable inbox, have already arrived for most Gmail users. A few are coming soon to an inbox near you: Just days after I presented a version of this story at The Newsletter Conference, Google Gemini launched an AI-powered daily briefing, giving users a morning update with the tasks they need to tackle that day, all based on what’s in Gmail and Google Calendar. Other features are available through new AI-powered inbox competitors or for power users comfortable with tools like Claude Code.
All will be available to the average user before too long.
What the AI-powered inbox might look like
I wouldn’t worry about any of these individual features. What I’m more focused on is what all of these changes — and future AI-powered features we haven’t yet seen — mean in the aggregate.
It’s easy to imagine two very different paths forward.
The first is that AI tools become so good at managing the inbox that the average user doesn’t need to check their email more than a few times per week. Artificial intelligence sorts through your email, sends replies to some, and alerts you when there’s something urgent that demands your attention. It can even sync up with community or productivity tools, like Slack or Trello, so you can skip that long email from your boss and just get to the tasks that need tackling. The inbox might become more like your physical mailbox: Something you check once a day, or perhaps even less.
The second path seems a bit more promising. Imagine your inbox as your personal VIP room at a nightclub, and AI as the bouncer. It figures out who you want to let in and who gets shut out at the door. When you log into your inbox, you only see the emails from the people or newsletters you really want to make time for. In this version of the inbox, your readers might also remember one of the killer features of email: You’re in charge, not another platform’s algorithm.
That version of the inbox might look more like a podcast feed, filled with emails and newsletters you’re actually excited to make time for.
In either version of this future inbox, users won’t use email the same way as before. If their habits are going to change, then your email strategy needs to change with it. Getting into the inbox will be just the start. To succeed, you’ll need to build a truly loyal audience, one that always makes time for your newsletter.
And yes, you’ll need to do that even in a more optimistic version of the future inbox. If your podcast app is anything like mine, there are a ton of podcasts you subscribe to but never actually listen to. Engagement is what will really count, not just showing up.
So how will you stand out in this future version of the inbox? I think it comes down to a simple question: What’s your unfair advantage?
Your unfair advantage is the thing that makes your newsletter truly indispensable. It’s the thing that you bring to the inbox that no one else can easily replicate. It’s the thing that gives you an edge over your competitors and makes your newsletter stand out.
As I’ve studied the email space, I’ve identified three ways newsletter-first publishers and creators can find their unfair advantage:
- Creating a brand, not just a newsletter
- Building around community
- Thinking like a mogul
Let’s talk through all three of these and figure out what you can apply to your newsletter to give you a leg up in the AI-powered inbox.
Create a brand, not just a newsletter
Standing out in the AI inbox starts with a clear sense of brand: what you stand for, how you show up in the inbox, and how your voice stands out. I think about brand less in terms of marketing and more in terms of how you position yourself and bring value to the inbox.
Within that lens, there are several ways to establish your brand.
Think about how you show up in the inbox
When a reader opens their inbox, they see a few things that help them immediately identify whether a newsletter is worth opening:
- Sent-from name — Who the email is from (i.e., “Dan Oshinsky” or “Dan at Inbox Collective”)
- Subject line + preheader text — The title of the email, plus the little bit of additional text that appears alongside or below the subject line
- Your logo
Most newsletters put a lot of thought into the first two pieces of what’s known as the “newsletter envelope.” Among major brands like Amazon and UPS, only about 40% have purchased either a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) or a Common Mark Certificate (CMC), which puts a logo and a blue checkmark in emails sent to Gmail and Yahoo inboxes. (And it’s not like it’s a matter of cost: These certificates cost less than $1,500 per year.) There haven’t been similar studies of the newsletter space, but anecdotally, I can tell you that those numbers are even lower. Case in point: In May, at The Newsletter Conference, about 25 newsletter-first brands spoke on stage. Just one had purchased a VMC or CMC — and there were some big brands on stage, like the Atlantic and Morning Brew.
Going through the process of getting your logo into inboxes is one of the easiest ways to stand out. Here’s how to do it for your newsletter.
Build a brand that stands for something
To succeed in this next version of the inbox, think about one magic word: Depth.
The newsletters that readers make space for are going to be the ones that go deeper on the topics they care about. These newsletters will deliver:
- Depth of reporting
- Depth of access
- Depth of insight
A newsletter like Stratechery succeeds because it goes deeper into the world of tech and business than others. Newsletters like the ones from Puck stand out because they peel back the curtain into the worlds of Hollywood or media. Even newsletters like So Many Thoughts, which covers the royal family, work because of their hyper-focused approach.
Having exceptional and unusual content will matter more and more. The newsletters that do will be able to clearly articulate how they serve their readers, which will help them secure a consistent spot in the inbox.
Lean into your personality
It’s easy to imagine a future in which you ask AI to manage emails from brands or reply to cold emails. But will you let AI reply to an email from your mom or best friend? Probably not.
What’s the difference? Readers will make time for the newsletters from the people they like and trust.
Your job then becomes finding ways to let your personality shine through. That could mean sending entire newsletters with lots of voice, or adding small ways to get a little bit of your perspective into your emails. (We’ve got lots of ideas for you to try.) In the AI inbox, your brand will be built around your voice — and that voice can separate your newsletter from a competitor’s.
Insert your voice into everything you do
As you think about voice, don’t stop at integrating it in the body of your newsletters. It needs to be in every reader touchpoint.
I don’t think anyone does this better than the Onion. They have such a defined voice — you know an Onion headline the moment you see one. But take a look at how they sell memberships to readers. Many publishers have a solid voice in their newsletter but generic messaging in marketing emails.
Not the Onion. You’ll see their voice everywhere.
Their house ads on their website sound like the Onion. (“Our miserable world at an unbeatable price.”) When they email readers with special offers to become members, it sounds like the Onion. Even after you complete the payment process, you’re not taken to the usual type of thank-you page. The Onion’s page starts with “Our conditional appreciation.”
These emails are funny, weird, snarky — and set the expectation that every time the Onion shows up in your inbox, they’re going to sound exactly like this. I’ve found myself even enjoying transactional messages from the Onion, since I wasn’t sure what they’d send. (They sent one deeply weird email welcoming me as a member of a secret society called the Onionati. It’s the first time I’ve ever laughed at a transactional email.)
Your voice can be a differentiator, and you ought to get it into everything you do.
Make sure your format matches your brand
When you think about matching format to brand, Axios is probably the most notable newsletter-first example. They promise “smart brevity,” and they’ve created a format to help you quickly get smarter on the biggest stories of the day.
One of my favorite examples, though, is Sioux Falls Simplified. They promise not just to deliver stories about that city council meeting or with the mayor — they want to help you understand what it means for you. That promise to simplify things is in their name, and it’s also in the format of every email they send.
Or take a newsletter like Growth in Reverse, which promises to dive deep into the world of newsletter growth. The first time you open that newsletter, you start going down the rabbit hole into that week’s case study. It’s easy to make space for a newsletter that delivers on the promise of their brand.
Building around community
When I think about great newsletters, I often think about a product that sits at the intersection of a few key points. Newsletters are a place where you can share stories, drive readers to take action, build relationships, and solicit feedback. If you think of it as a Venn diagram, it looks a little like this:
Newsletters sit in the middle of that diagram, but so can something else: Community.
When you build a community, your readers become part of something bigger that supports them in their life and work. These aren’t just subscribers anymore — they’re stakeholders. And if they’re that invested in your work, they will always make space for you in their inbox.
It’s why I think the writers and teams that succeed in the AI inbox won’t be in the business of building newsletters. They’ll be in the business of creating community.
When you start to think about your newsletter in that new way — How do I serve my existing community? How do I bring more readers into the fold? — you begin to notice opportunities you might otherwise miss.
One of my favorite examples is from BackScoop, a newsletter that covers startups and tech in Southeast Asia. At first glance, it seems a bit like a Morning Brew copycat. But when you look closer, you see a community at work.
BackScoop doesn’t just highlight businesses and stories through its newsletter. They’ve also built out a robust events strategy. Every month, they host multiple events across Southeast Asia, from Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City. These include happy hours designed to bring readers together, dinners where founders and investors can connect, and are private events where people with ideas for a new business can meet potential co-founders or supporters.
The people who want to read a newsletter about startups and tech in Southeast Asia are also the ones building companies in this space, which means BackScoop can do more than just inform or sell to them — it can also connect them.
And they’ve taken things a step further. Recently, they launched a product called Inner Circle. For a monthly membership fee, BackScoop will make private, curated introductions to others in its community. You submit some information about what you’re looking for, like connections to a potential co-founder, and they find you other members of the community who you should meet one-on-one.
The fact that BackScoop can build not just a newsletter readership but a network like this is a huge unfair advantage. Other newsletters can cover startups or tech, but can they introduce you to someone who might invest in your new company? Probably not. A newsletter that can open doors for you is one you’ll always prioritize in your inbox.
Think like a mogul
A strong relationship with readers via email is crucial for any modern publisher or creator. But as the inbox changes, I think it’s important to hedge your bets and build new ways to both reach and monetize your audience.
That means investing in new channels. Algorithmic channels, like social media platforms or YouTube, can help you reach new readers, but they come with some risk, as those platforms do often change the rules. You can build a big audience there, but you may not always be able to reach your core reader, viewer, or listener. Owned channels, like SMS, events, or a community-centric option like Discord or Slack, don’t offer the same level of scale, but they do give you a more direct line to your audience.
Many newsletter-first orgs are already starting to think this way, making big bets on new ways to reach readers.
But I’d encourage you to think even bigger. This isn’t just about launching a podcast as a lifeboat in case the newsletter waters get choppy. It’s about an opportunity to invest in your brand and in your community — and build something far bigger than a newsletter.
It’s time to think less like a newsletter operator and more like a media mogul.
When you study the strategies of legacy media moguls like Henry Luce, Katharine Graham, or Ted Turner, a few things stand out. They expanded beyond their core media business, creating new lines of business to drive revenue. Those new businesses gave them new touchpoints for loyalty, stability in bad times, and massive upside in good times.
And then they reinvested revenues back into the core business.
You can do the same with your newsletter.
Take the team at Every, which launched as a tech publication but pivoted to focus on AI. They’ve long had a paid subscription, and it’s been their core revenue driver. But as they’ve built an audience around AI, they started to think bigger. Readers already trust them as an expert voice on AI. Why not find new ways to help their audience get ahead in the AI space?
So they’ve launched their own AI-powered software, like Spiral, a writing assistant, and Monologue, a voice dictation software. (Subscribers get access to all of these tools, but anyone can purchase them separately, too.) They’ve launched paid courses, where readers can learn how to master tools like Claude Code. And they’ve launched a consulting arm, where they can work directly with businesses and teach them how to integrate AI into their workflows.
In March 2026, according to a screenshot shared by their team, subscriptions brought in about $250,000 in revenue, which means their annual subscription revenues are likely north of $3 million. That’s pretty impressive for a small publication, but that’s just a fraction of their overall revenue. Courses brought in more than $77,000 in March. Software brought in almost $63,000. And consulting brought in $215,000.
All of this means they’ve been able to raise the revenue ceiling for Every. They can take that money and reinvest in the core business — more writers, more original content — which can reach new audiences, which will lead to new paying subscribers, new buyers for courses or software, and likely a lot of new consulting clients. It’s a flywheel that will allow them to grow Every far beyond what they could do as a typical newsletter-first business.
Or look at Bulletpitch, a newsletter that highlights early-stage startups. At the start, they monetized through ads, the way many newsletters do. But they quickly realized that they were attracting both sides of the startup world — founders and investors. So they built a series of events, largely supported by advertisers, to get that audience in the same room together.
But then they took things one step further. Early-stage startups were knocking on their door, trying to raise money for their businesses. So Bulletpitch created their own investment syndicate to support promising startups. Thinking bigger like this could unlock significant profits if just one of their investments turns into the next big company.
Even local publishers can think like a mogul. I love what the Midcoast Villager, based in Camden, Maine, has been building. They’re a traditional print newspaper business with paid subscriptions and ads. But look under the hood, and you’ll see that they’ve gone far beyond that.
They opened a cafe in Camden that serves breakfast and lunch to their community. The cafe is also an events space hosting multiple events per week, like live music or arts and crafts events. They rent out the space to others in the community, too. And all of this is part of a larger media company, Islandport Media, which owns multiple newspapers in Maine, as well as a direct marketing business and even a catering business.
And if you’re thinking, “How are other newsletters supposed to compete with Every’s consulting business, Bulletpitch’s investment syndicate, or Midcoast Villager’s IRL cafe?” that’s exactly the point. By thinking like moguls, they’ve created new unfair advantages that will allow them to stand out for years to come.
Anyone can find their unfair advantage
I want to share one more story, just to prove that anyone, even a tiny indie team, can thrive in the age of the AI-powered inbox.
In 2021, Kevin Maguire was working as a marketer. After his first child was born, he told me he went through a period of depression. He couldn’t find a trusted source to help him through this period, so he decided to start one himself.
He started by figuring out his brand: “Dads with feelings.” He launched a newsletter called the New Fatherhood. He didn’t start with an existing audience, and he wasn’t an expert in the parenting space, but one newsletter at a time, he started to build a readership. As he did, he invested in his brand — logo, fonts, how he’d show up on platforms like social media.
The brand grew, and so did the community around it. He started hosting meetups around the world for his readers. He built a Discord community called “The Dadscord” so readers could ask hard questions about parenting in a friendly space. He realized that some of his readers needed professional support but couldn’t afford it, so he created a fund to help these dads get access to therapy.
And he even started thinking like a mogul. Readers started asking him if they could work with him directly, so he became a certified coach. Now he’s building a practice around helping dads one-on-one.
Five years later, Kevin built something bigger than a newsletter. He’s got 21,000 subscribers on his list and he recently published his first book. He’s built a loyal audience, a strong brand, he’s bringing in revenue beyond the inbox — and it will just compound in value in the next decade. I’d bet that someone like Kevin will have great success in the AI-powered inbox, all because he’s put the right pieces in place to stand out, build loyalty, and drive revenue.
Remember: This isn’t the end of the inbox, just the start of a new era. It’s up to you to find your unfair advantages. Do that, and you won’t just survive the AI-powered inbox — you’ll build something even better than before.
