.mail app

Best of luck w/ the implementation. However, reading the concept, I am unimpressed.

In Mail.app, I can already mark e-mails with different-colored flags, which allows me to come up with my own "get back soon" or "get back later" type of a system.

The assertion that e-mail hasn't changed since 1970's is false. Modern e-mail clients manage it much better. Compare Mail.app, Outlook and GMail to PINE--the difference is staggering. The true innovator in the e-mail space has been GMail, which has brought things like autosave, concepts such as embracing the fact that it is not truly productive to file every single e-mail into a purposeful folder, embracing that tagging is better than folders. GMail also really pushed the conversational view and presented it in a single-screen way that was innovative (compare how long it took e-mail clients to catch up with that... and no, "group by thread" did not compare).

I'm also very wary of anyone advertising "clean typography." People start adding spacing and now I only end up previewing 2/3rds of what I could preview in one screenful.

From: https://vanschneider.squarespace.com/mail-the-first-summary -- "Currently I'm developing a prototype and then hopefully move on to Kickstarter. But there's no plan yet if it's going to be a WebApp, MacOS or Windows app."

In other words, vaporware (so far).

Whoo boy does that site ever not work without javascript... Sort of ridiculous since it's a static page advertising a desktop app, neither of which should require javascript at all.

EDIT: Oh God, and hot pink highlighting does NOT complement their color scheme. And for all its javascript fanciness, it doesn't handle resizing at all. Sorry to be so negative, this site just pushes all my buttons.

First thing I thought of when I read the heading Actionsteps was being able to tailor actions specific to each email. For instance, you receive an email from Twitter saying someone's following you, and you're given the options to either "follow", "@reply", "ignore", etc, and similarly for Facebook. Receive a bill from ATT and your next steps are "pay bill", "file as important", "put on to-do."

You're essentially containing all of the work necessary to resolve the subject of the email within the client itself. You could allow for app plugins/extensions so that others could develop hooks into various services.

Other than that, it looks clean and simple. I'm eager to try it out when it's launched.

What is it? It took me quite a while (and a few web links) to discover that it's a Mac email client.

Interesting how many new email clients are emerging this summer. I'm taking note due to the likely abandonment of Sparrow. Also due to come out "this summer" is Mail Pilot: http://mail-pilot.com/

I've just installed OS X Mountain Lion... and gone back to Apple's Mail (no more Sparrow). I'm too tired of chasing another email/to-do client that might get acq-hired, with no future support.

Having said that, the idea behind .mail app is elegant, well thought and a step forward. Kudos.

I'd like to be able to read my e-mail address while typing it please...

    $("input#email").css("color", "#333");

Otherwise, fantastic. Thanks. Ideally you just buy Sparrow and add the 2 features it was missing. We can only hope.

It's good to see some actual followthrough on the initial concept.

I honestly like the proposed Attachments and Notifications features (I'm also not a mail client aficionado, so I don't know if these are particularly groundbreaking), but the Actionsteps thing sounds clumsy to me. If my problem is that I don't have enough time to parse, read, and respond to all of my email, I don't understand how adding another step will alleviate that.

> "When the first email was sent in the early 1970's there was no big difference to the email we know today." - And this is the problem.

Actually, this is the greatest advantage of email: its extreme portability across platforms and clients.

We can reinvent the way we interact with it, but we don't need to reinvent the technology itself. This is an immensely important distinction.

"Actionsteps solves the flagging problem, where every email you know that you need to respond to is of equal importance."

Wouldn't it be interesting if the sender of an email could specify what Actionsteps are required for a given email? i.e. The sender specifies that an email should be: read by the receiver, replied to by the receiver, forwarded to a specific department, complete a specific task, etc.

A bone to pick with the name: Leading "." in filenames usually causes the Finder (and ls) to omit the files in listings.

Maybe not a great look for an email app.

For anyone who is confused, this is the implementation of a concept which was posted 2 weeks ago.

It's looking really good, can't wait to try it!

Link to concept post: http://www.vanschneider.com/work/mail/ And original HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223869

Looks interesting, there's definitely stuff that can be done to make email better. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.

If you're interested in this and you're a GMail user you might also be interested in Active Inbox[1] which adds some useful features on top of Gmail. It lets you mark emails GTD style as "Action" (requires an action), "Waiting" (waiting on someone else) or "SomeDay" (there's an action to take, but you might not do it now). It also has an easy way to sort emails by project and some other useful features.

Disclaimer: I met Andy of Active Inbox recently and ended up doing a few days work on the product. But I was a happy (and paying) user of Active Inbox before that!

[1]: https://www.activeinboxhq.com/

Just a heads up, if the creator is reading here, your page loads 0 content with javascript blocked. A minimal plea for javascript unblocking might gain you extra traffic - I know I didn't care enough to add you to my whitelist, since I had NOTHING to go on.

Pretty nice timing: - Sparrow announces that they've been acquired by Google on the 20th - on the 23th http://dotmailapp.com/ gets created (as far as i can see it from the DNS record)

I'm confused. Is this only for Mac (it looks like it from the screenshots)? I find it a terrible business move to have a start-up release their product only for a platform that is much less than 10% of the world's personal computing marketshare.

It looks nice, but I think you have shot yourself in the foot for trying to release a Mac app first. Windows doesn't have any good email application that is still developed anymore. Pretty much the choices are Outlook and Thunderbird (the latter of which was just announced would have no more feature developing). People are looking for the next email client to flock to...

What I think is most interesting about this is how successfully implemented this PR campaign is. I think some of the criticism of the app is warranted: but we have nothing concrete to look at, and no real information about how the app will be developed. It seems likely to be a case of someone believing too much in the power of 'design' while overlooking the importance of 'implementation'. If I could somehow be convinced that these two things were conceived of holistically by the creator I'd be much more interested.

I do, however, really applaude the precision with which this project has appealed to people's desires.

With the gmail web interface I already have all of these features,

actionsteps are stars in gmail, i use yellow & red bang, and red star .. just press s to rotate,

attachments have never been an issue but maybe thats just me, searching for "from:a@b has:att<down><tab>" is quite quick enough

and using filters & labels gives me the notification functionality, e.g. messages from facebook get a label, i can see facebook (3) or whatever on the left, but it will work for any type of email i wish.

"meh" is my main reaction to this, unless it has something new and is as transparent to synchronisation across devices as gmail i won't be interested

This looks nice, but doesn't strike me as a revolution.

What I would love to see is a mail client that does away with the antiquated inbox/sent paradigm. It would be replaced by active/archived. If I send an email, it would appear in my active list until the expected outcome is achieved (eg. a reply). At that point I archive it. Sent and received would sit in the same view (like Facebook, etc), why they don't already on clients is beyond me. I shouldnt have to manage 2 views to ensure I've acted on received and others have acted on my sent.

Seem very similar to Mail Pilot (www.mail-pilot.com), although Mail Pilot seems that it will still be a monthly paid service, as .Mail app doesn't (at least I couldn't find if it is).

Which is a big deal for me. As for .Mail seems like you pay for the app such as Sparrow (which it looks similar too) and not have to pay monthly for it.

I plan on buying it if it comes out as it shows and does what it does.

Anyone know when it is coming out? And if it will have a monthly cost?

Perfect timing on this, right after the demise of sparrow. I was starting to really get down on the idea of having no really nice desktop mail client for OSX.

Really looking forward to checking out this app, and I really hope Tobias is either secretly an incredible osx programmer or is going to get one on board to help, because it would be a shame to see a beautifully designed interface like this be brought down by poor implementation.

It would be great if instead of having to build a new app ground up every time we want to add a few features, if we could simply add those features to the existing application.

This would be a lot easier if that application was open source, but having a modular architecture and malleable/extensible design would be more important.

Does anyone have thoughts on application that are designed such that features can be added to it easily?

As long as you don't sell your product to Google and stop development as soon as I get used to it and start liking it.

Isn't there too much emphasis on 'click' on the page? The interface gives a feeling that it not benefit power users.

I usually never leave my keyboard when reading/writing emails. Keyboard shortcuts on GMail (and Sparrow) have been the most important feature for me to get my mail done faster.

Smells like an acquisition in a year or so (and I mean that as a compliment). Congrats in advance.

I didn't think concept was flexible enough when it originally ran here on HN frontpage.

Any plans for cross-platform support or is this yet another Apple only affair?

Assuming one of the creators reads this: "A clean and Actionsteps."

I would like better attachment management than I've got now, so I'll probably take a peek. Thanks.

Issue in Chrome [v 20.0.1132.47 m]

Focusing in the email textbox, followed by tabbing out causes the box to shift down (pretty sure that's not intentional)

Now is the perfect time to re-create Sparrow.

Would love to have a ubuntu version of this. Will pay up to 30$. Or any other mail client

".Mail is coming to your dock" Well... I supposed it won't come out for Linux.

Am I the only one who worries about the branding of this?

Looking awesome

Someone wants to work at Google/Facebook then.

But on a more serious note, it doesn't look like a cocoa app to me so I'm not that keen on it. Too much custom UI and looks more at home on Windows 8