Show HN: Email hasn't changed in 20 years, I've coded something new for 9 months | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Email hasn't changed in 20 years, I've coded something new for 9 months

ivelope.com

50 pointsmuszc-master47 comments

I wish you well with this, but I don't see why I would want to use it. I don't see any mention of email priority settings or incoming filters, which are key to my email workflow. (I have hundreds of filters that automatically prioritize my email for me before I even begin to read them each day.)

I'm fairly attached to a native-app based workflow (I'm a big fan of Postbox, and before that I used Eudora), so I'm probably not the target market for this anyway.

The search looks promising though, and while the design does look 2005-ish, I don't mind the design of the promo website. Something about the font feels slightly off (somehow Windows-like with the way it antialiases, fonts are a bit too small in places) but it isn't terrible. The animated screenshots are really helpful.

(One tip: be open to charging a lot for it. Email is mission critical and one of the apps I spend the most time in, I am happy to spend money on having the best experience possible. Postbox charges $40 and I still feel that's a bargain.)

Thank you for your comment! I agree that filtering and priority settings are very important, maybe it wasn't clear enough but there are two animations with active (if you send a question in an email and are waiting for an answer the email will be marked as active) & inactive emails and the drag & drop filtering option.

Some people has said that they prefer native-apps and I still haven't decided if this will be a web app or a native app (using Electron, which for example Visual Studio Code is built with). The design will be fixed and probably next week I'll have updated the landing page with a more modern design.

Thanks for all your feedback and yes - email is a mission critical app and the target audience is people spend a lot of time with email so saving a lot of time and effort in that department would be worth paying for for some people.

Any feedback is very much appreciated. A lot of people I've shown it to doesn't like the design and think it is too 2005-ish. I have to admit, I'm a developer first and designer... second...

Literally came to say this. Looks really old.

And the fade-ins on the website itself it kind annoying.

Yes, a lot of people don't like the design, so the design is something that I'm going to start working on changing asap. Going to talk to my designer friends. Do you have an example of a GUI that you think would be fitting for this kind of webapp? Something similar to PolyMail?

Polymail looks nice and modern, but it looks like any other client for a multitude of apps. 100% preferred over something old looking though.

Thanks for the comment! I will try to come up with a good design for next week!

I don't have any feedback (not big on email myself), but i just came to sympathize with your design woes. It's just so difficult, imo.

From the people I've talked to regarding the design it seems to be a divided camp between making the design more like Premier Pro: https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/files/2016/04/6-PR-Sec...

or more like this: https://dribbble.com/shots/1334369-Mochila-Mail-manufactured

What do you think?

Take a massive dose of salt with my comment, as i am not a designer.

Personally, i think the mochila design looks better, but i really like dark designs (easy on the eyes), so the Premier is nice on that front.

No worries, I think it's a matter of taste and I will try to find a good design that will look more modern either going in the mochila or premier pro direction.

So, been sketching on the new design, what do you think about this: http://ivelope.com/img/newdesign.png ?

If you want to attract the majority of users, you need to have at least some aesthetic in your product. Try to research Polymail and Nylas N1.

Yes, the design is what people complain about a lot, new design on the way I'm gonna try to release it with the new design next week

What do you think about this? http://ivelope.com/img/newdesign.png

I think the current design fine. I mainly work on the desktop and want to gather much things to process. Waiting in the line to try this out.

Thank you for comment!

This seems very similar to what once was Google Wave. That's not a criticism, though. I miss Wave.

Yes, some functionality is inspired by Google Wave :) Hopefully this will not go the same way that Wave did though

Really nice concept. I can see myself using a web email client when I need to move between Mac, Windows, and Linux. Features look promising, however I feel like the UI design is a little dated. It reminds me of Outlook 2005. Perhaps if you try moving into a more modern design format, you'll be able to attract users more easily. Other than that, I'd be happy to try it out soon!

Thank you for the comment! A lot of people love the functionality but hate how it looks so my priority right now is to make a more modern design for next week, stay tuned!

Looks interesting. The biggest question I have that isn't answered on the website is what is your business model? I doesn't look like an open source project but it isn't clear.

Yes, it is not an open-source project but the intention is to make it into an SaaS if the beta launch goes well and people like it enough to pay a small fee for extra features.

If this were a stand-alone app, I would use it. For me the workflow seems better than Mail.app or Thunderbird.

+1 for using characters from the HBO show Silicon Valley.

+2 for using TPS Reports!

Thank you for your comment! And a lot of people has requested it to be a stand-alone app so maybe this is the direction I in which I should head..

Honestly, this is awesome. I use Gmail web as my default clients and while I was watching the video I was like... yes, yes and YES! Most compelling features were: calendar in email, tabs, quick edits. Things that appealed less where threading and tasks, since I'd assume others have to use this product too.

I've signed up for beta and can't wait to try it out.

Thank you for your feedback! I've received massive amounts of love for this product and if you'd like to get involved somehow, you can find my email in the footer of the landing page :)

The only thing that attract my eyeball is the tabs. Others are identical to all sorts of mail agent product out there. Also, you need to think about who is your customer. If you are targeting at developers, the front-end isn't that important but the performance and functionality are crucial. For what you currently offer, I don't see a clear position of your product.

Thank you for your feedback. The target market is not really developers but people who use email more than 3 hours per date. It has a lot of similar functionality to for example Outlook - but there are small things - for example adding an email to your calendar by clicking on a date that Outlook doesn't have but makes a big difference in how you use it I think. Glad to receive your feedback I will try to clarify my positioning also!

The front-end part looks ok to me. I hope your invite queue advances quickly enough so I can try it soon.

The instant-meeting-setup feature is nice, but the main email/agenda solution have this covered in an acceptable way already, IMO.

I know for a fact that providing a search feature in a mail service isn't an easy problem to solve. Can you tell us a bit about the infrastructure behind this service ?

Good points. Thank you. About searching the email inbox: Upon first signing on, all emails (and filenames) in the inbox will be indexed and cached to MySQL and we're also working on providing an option to use WebSQL to cache this locally.

You may want to aggressively filter the amount of emails you're going to index, then. It's not rare that people have inboxes bigger than 10Gb.

To be honest, I think email search is something even Google hasn't succeeded yet. The way it's introduced on your homepage makes me think you have succeeded...but it will definitely be HARD to scale if your service becomes popular.

Yes that is absolutely correct, we'll be using an agressive filter for what data is indexed, and to make it fast, the search will primarily search the most recent emails & files...

What does this offer over, say Outlook? Tabs are nice, but mostly it looks like just another average mail client, just on the web.

If you watch the demo video, I'm showing a lot more of the functionality - for example the ability that when multiple users send emails via Ivelope, it turns the email into a reddit-like thread with different levels of indentation which is also, I think, the reason why Reddit won over traditional web forums - right now, email is like an old school web forum, but with Ivelope it turns emails into real discussion threads - one of the reasons that Reddit is one of the most popular places to discuss things on.

You also have the separation between emails from people and emails from computers (newsletters/promos) into a separate folder, which is displayed in an overview mode, where you can see the email instantly and also unsubscribe from ANY email with one click of a button :)

Thanks for posting this. I think you need to work on finding your key differentiators and putting them up front in video & marketing materials.

Curious how you handle something like the task feature when the recipient is not an ivelope user.

Very good point, thank you. So when someone has sent you a task that is not using Ivelope and you click "Mark task as Done", the first time the user will be shown a popup on how to handle this, if he wants Ivelope to send an email every time he sets a task as finished, or if he wants to send an email when all tasks in an email are finished or if he just wants the tasks for his own personal todolist. Having unique features will bring in more users I think.

But it is an email client, or a client to some other protocol?

It's a web-based email client with some features which will only work fully when both users are using Ivelope (but most features work for everyone) - and also does it count as a protocol when [] in text is converted into a task? :P

Is this an IMAP client in the browser, or something where you give your email credentials to some server somewhere and it looks at all your mail?

This is a concern several people has voiced, and it's not yet decided if it will become a native-app or a web-based client that was my first thought. There are two camps basically: people who would hesitate to give their credentials to an unknown server and would want a native-app and people who don't care about that and would prefer a webmail client.

Wish you well, but I would love it to be a Mac mail agent instead of a web base client.

Yes many people has asked for this and I'm trying to figure out in what direction to go :)

eMails, tasks, conversations, documents, searched and indexed, all bound up together in one integrated whole.

Is this another Lotus Notes? Or the ill-fated Chandler?

I sure hope not!

i thought the website was called 'ive-eloped' and had a hefty chuckle.

Haha that's funny!

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