Hacker News Reader

Comment by crowdhailer | Hacker News Reader

We do not require any access to your inbox, messages sent directly to your email do not pass through our service.

Messages within Plum Mail, are stored on our servers. Central coordination is what enables us to offer features like concluding a conversation and pins that show the same state to all participants.

It is a fair concern, one that always needs to be considered when using a cloud service, it is certainly possible to have the convenience of Plum Mail for some conversations and keep financial/medical sent directly to your email for peace of mind.

View on HN

Wait. I might be reading your comment wrong or missing something, but my understanding from your comment is that you are just using email addresses as the identities of a group chat system, instead of actually using emails as the group chat?

You are correct that email addresses are identifiers in our system, and that emails themselves are not the core mechanism within the app.

However this approach allows us to have features that would not be possible in just emails, but still have fallback interactions via emails to users not yet on the platform.

Thanks. In that case, I'm confused on why do y'all choose to emphasize email that much in your product's introduction (you even have the word "mail" in your product's name).

Email is like one of the most common used identity, if not "the" most common used one, for web/cloud services. It's used as identity for roughly half of services in the wild, yet they don't put email/mail in their names, or emphasize that they are email alternatives.

You said emails are not the _core_ mechanism within the app. Maybe besides using them as identities, you also use emails for other, "non-core" way? Can you clarify on that? Maybe it's only me but it really confuses me that you emphasize email in such a way but only use them as identities.

All good points. Plum Mail is B2C and HN is a well-informed technical audience it's probably fair to say. We felt we needed something less abstract than just a fruit in the name to explain what you do in this application - i.e. you write to people and they write back like when you send and receive mail (distinct from 'e'mail).

We toyed with using the word 'messenger' but that's much less representative of the longform way in which Plum Mail nudges you to write. Messengers are synchronous, one liner, emojis etc.

At least with the word mail in the name, anyone hearing about it for the first time can have a pretty good guess at what it does. The technicality of using the email address as the identifier and passwordless authentication etc is important (but probably only really interesting to a technical audience).

Thoughts?

I perceived the product incorrectly, just like GP did.

The people I know who don't use Slack yet are mostly older and mostly use Outlook. I think they'd be confused and irritating if we sent them emails with the frequency of chat.

Especially phone email notifications are not tuned to correctly handle instant messages.

I have often dreamed of a similar concept, but have never been able to work the UX out in my mind. Hopefully you have. Best of luck!

You're so right. They would get hugely annoyed. Plum Mail isn't a messenger really, I mean sure you could use it as such but then you could use email like that too and cause just as many notifications.

We're planning daily digest emails to group together multiple messages with individual reply buttons.

Showed it and explained it to my gran and she seemed to get it just fine. This is a woman that couldn't understand why her iPad wasn't charging until I explained it did actually need plugging into the wall. lol.

I think anyone would get confused and irritated by some weird confusion over email and Plum Mail. I think the next step is to ship v1 and see how users get on with it. I'll try to remember to report back what we learn.

We aren't trying to create messages at the frequency of chat. Features like pinning and others aim to encourage more productive, and also less frequent messaging.

This should really be clarified on the landing page!

Fair comment. I'll work on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com