We built a SaaS company to make email better

Email has been the major communication vehicle through my career. The work team I joined a year ago uses Slack. Our employer's official vehicle for "chat" is Teams. My team's high school interns prefer Discord. Some friends use FB Messenger. Others use text.

I have no preference. In the end, all of them can send messages point-to-point or broadcast. You can share documents in all of them. (I haven't tried it in Discord but I assume you can.) I can communicate and get work done in any other them.

Just a few observations.

1. Trying to figure out who communicated where can become challenging.

2. Better integration with "productivity" apps can make 1 less challenging. For instance, a co-worker requests a new API by a certain date. If it's done in Slack, for example, it would help to have it appear in my task list without my having to add it manually. Likewise, a friend sends a message in FB messenger about a cookout: having it go to my calendar would be helpful rather than my remembering a week later which app she sent the message in so I can put it on the calendar manually.

3. My employer is notorious for abusing email. We have message threads with 10-20 people and dozens of replies. Often I would love a way to opt out: a real opt out, not a reply with a request to Reply All minus me. Not having this feature is a deal breaker for email going forward IMO.

EDIT: it seems the title of submission was changed (previously it said that email is better than Slack)

I can't count the number of times I've seen people reply-all when they shouldn't have (and come very close myself), reply to the wrong chain, forward sensitive information that was shown way back at the beginning of a long chain. I remember one incredibly egregious case where my director and manager had a long, drawn out discussion about terminating one of my coworkers in an email thread. About how it really needed to be done, but the timing wasn't ideal because they needed her to wrap up an important client project, but she was kind of bad at her job, so maybe they should do it now, but there wasn't anyone to pick the project up so they agreed to wait a month and a half.

Later on their conversation turned to some other things that were relevant to my work, and the director forwarded the whole chain to me and one other person on the team to "see the details in this chain."

Of course we brought it to the boss' attention, but the damage was done, and my coworker and I couldn't un-know what we had read, nor could we say anything to our coworker.

That was an incredibly uncomfortable and stressful 6 weeks sitting next to the woman every day who I knew was going to be fired soon and being unable to say anything.

I've seen people reply-all griping about clients and get walked out of the building minutes later.

Yes, I realize that the "where was that message? Email or slack (or whatever)?" is a legit problem that creates some friction. But for my money, reducing the risk of blunders like that far outweighs the problems it presents. I really really want isolated channels.

- What will you do if the other company decides to change the way it looks/acts/feels without consulting you?

- What will you do if the other company decides to take active measures to stop you hijacking their product?

- What will you do if the other company decides that you've got some great ideas and they will implement those features themselves?

It doesn't actually matter what the answers are to those questions, because they all boil down to the same result for the customer: someday this is going to stop working, so I had better not rely on it even if it does seem to be shiny and useful right now.

Gmail is large but, even so, I don't understand why would a company throw out a massive potential user base, by limiting itself to gmail.

A counterpoint, though, is to think about the long game. Since email is an open protocol, it will likely _never_ go away. There is incredible leverage around this. Businesses & tools built on email will work for a long, long time. There is a legitimate business case to be made, today, for building things on email, and that, in turn, makes email stickier.

Perhaps Slack stays forever, but perhaps not. It's possible that a new productivity fad comes into play and makes chat apps a thing of the past. If it's built on an open protocol - and an open protocol that's not restricted to one workspace - then Slack will likely exist for a long, long time.

The thing I’ve noticed with people who HATE email is they try and treat email as though it’s an app like Slack and they let themselves be constantly interrupted and respond to things as they come in.

My system is pretty simple. I have specific times during the day where I check email. Otherwise it’s closed. When I check, I look to see if it can be deleted/archived, is it actionable, does it need to be dealt with now or later. I NEVER respond to emails while triaging. All I’m doing is clearing the inbox and determine how things should be filtered. I also look for opportunities to create rules to auto sort a particular type of email.

The email gets put into to my task manager and I respond when I make it to that task on the list. I may set the priority depending on urgency but my goal is to treat responding to email like any other work task and not some special thing that trumps all other work. I think this is where people slip up. Someone sending me an email does not make them more important than the other tasks that I may be working on.

How is your tool going to solve that? Looks like adding one more place to me. Most companies can't/won't move completely to Gmelius (or some other all-in-one tool).

Granted, i didn't read much further because the fake chat notification (https://i.vgy.me/QINgMY.gif) made me close the tab.

And "640k is enough for anyone"

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...

Not that I promote Slack, or think that email will go away soon.

> Transparent or Private Communication

To be honest, this sounds more like a decision about using gmail or not.

Anyone wants to share ICQ numbers? You know, like the cool kids do?

2. Building a product on top of a Google product, even if it is Gmail?

3. Stop trying to make email something that it's not. Basecamp, Slack, Trello, they're successful because they aren't email. Add-ons to email are just headaches for everyone