Avec’s AI reads your email to catch due dates

Avec, a newly launched email application, now offers a feature that automatically identifies deadlines within your messages. When you swipe left on an email you cannot handle at the moment, the app extracts the relevant due date and resurfaces that message on the appropriate day. The feature is designed to reduce the cognitive load of managing a crowded inbox by ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

The startup, which has secured $8.4 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Haystack, is only four months into its public existence. It was founded by Jonathan Unikowski, a former product engineer at Replit, and debuted in April. Unikowski has made a notably bold claim about the new capability, stating that while the team initially doubted its ability to extract due dates reliably, the feature now works consistently. That assertion, however, is a founder’s perspective rather than a verifiable, tested guarantee.

What remains conspicuously absent from the company’s communications is any detail about where the email scanning occurs. Extracting a date from a message requires a model to parse its contents, yet Avec has not disclosed whether this processing happens locally on the user’s device or on a remote server. Furthermore, there is no public information about what data is retained after the analysis.

Leaving this question unanswered is a significant misstep for an email product. Years ago, TNW raised similar concerns about Superhuman, when a simple tracking pixel turned a highly praised email client into a privacy liability. The precedent is clear: users in this space are increasingly sensitive to how their correspondence is handled.

There is also a modern threat to consider. An assistant that reads incoming mail is vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded within the text of a message. At launch, a user publicly asked Avec about this exact vulnerability, and the company’s response has not been detailed.

For many potential users, particularly in Europe, testing the app is not even an option. Avec is currently available only on iOS and exclusively supports Gmail accounts. Unikowski has admitted that he cannot guarantee the same level of support outside the United States and Canada, leaving a large portion of the global market without access.

In contrast, a European competitor directly addresses the privacy gap Avec leaves open. Proton’s writing assistant can operate entirely on the user’s device if desired, leveraging an open model from Mistral. The company states that it logs nothing regardless of the configuration.

That approach comes with a tangible trade-off. Proton’s assistant cannot learn from your inbox, so its output tends to be generic. That is precisely the kind of fluency Avec is marketing, which creates a clear fork in the road for consumers who care about both privacy and personalization.

The pressure is also mounting from another direction. Google is integrating agentic features directly into Gmail, the very service that Avec depends on for its core functionality. As the platform evolves, third-party apps built on top of it may find themselves squeezed.

On its own terms, the swipe-to-schedule feature is a clever and practical addition. But the larger question for any application in this category is not whether the gesture works smoothly. It is what your mail passes through on its journey back to you. That is the detail that will ultimately determine whether this tool is a convenience or a compromise.