The Mail Pilot Public Beta | Hacker News Reader

The Mail Pilot Public Beta

mailpilot.co

30 pointsalexobenauer30 comments

From the about page:

Email is in need of a fresh start. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I can’t wait to check my email!”

Am I the only person who has no problem managing their email? I'm a software developer and have 4 email accounts that I check regularly all from the same Thunderbird email client. I have filters and folders for mailinglists. I have different accounts for different personas (personal, work, work and open source/fun). I get hundreds of mails per day, tens a day that I actually need to react to.

I really don't have the problem of dreading to check my email. I know I'm not a manager of a startup or a big company, but then most people aren't.

I'm with you. What I dread is missing an email (spam filter, etc), not actually receiving messages.

That underlies a major issue i'm seeing more of in the tech startup scene: Coming up with solutions to problems a large majority of users don't face. Blog after blog proclaiming that "Email is broken", "It's time to rethink email" etc, etc.

No. Your users don't think that at all. They are happily chugging along, oblivious to the crises manufactured by neckbeards. Your value proposition needs to be reframed in terms of what your product can do on it's own merit; without the need to attempt to deprecate an existing technology/platform.

These are solutions to problems faced by middle- and upper-management, so there are real customers out there that have this real problem. The difficulty, however, is getting this cool, shiny solution into their existing corporate email workflow.

Exactly. People seem to be designing entirely consumer focused experiences around a problem that's main pained group and largest collection of cash is the upper echelons of corporations.

I think when you're at that level you're actually competing with humans. If I'm upper management and have too much incoming mail, I can hire a human to help me sift/prioritise/ignore as well as all the other things a human can help me with.

Very very very well put! That actually holds true to many B2B sales scenarios - especially when targeting C levels.

// OT //

Your point connected especially well with me since it rang so many bells with what I experienced when I was pitching my last startup (now defunct) in the live music industry.

Music and live music industry is a bit perverted in that it's such a "cool" scene to be associated with that it has a constant flux of fresh and very much free workforce available. As in humans.

This eventually created a bit of a conundrum in terms of value creation and pitching digital solutions to our prospecting customers - the live music promoters.

How exactly can you create value out of eg. time savings or better workflow management if the essential resource (workforce) is basically free and abundant. :)

Needless to say I'm not a huge fan of music startups in general nowadays for this particular reason since this problem basically permeates the whole industry through and through.

I have a hard time seeing a B2B / B2B2C service provider extracting a meaningful business out of music industry SMB's.

But I digress. :)

Like I said in my other message: They already have it, and it's called MS Outlook.

There's nothing mentioned in the advantages list that one cannot do readily with Outlook (under a different name for the feature in some cases).

I totally wake up every morning and think, "I can't wait to check my email!"

I paid $60 to try it out. Not worth it right now. It might, might be worth it when the desktop app is out.

I wish I didn't fork over the money.

Upvoted. Sorry to hear about your buyer's remorse, but thanks for paying it and posting your thoughts. Anything more specific? Likes and dislikes?

The web UI was slow and I didn't realize it was web-only until I bought it.

Can I get a refund?

So.. there's no way to try it without dropping $60?

It looks nice, but I don't even buy operating systems without trying them first, let alone subscription services.

This - asking me to commit $60 for a whole year, without even giving me 15 or 30 days to see if it works for me really puts me off.

There seems to be an overconfidence from the developer that they have the perfect solution to something that isn't really a problem.

And it's not a one-time payment, they want a subscription payment every year, which is incredibly obnoxious for a desktop app.

I appreciate that someone is making an email app for power users. It does a lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's priority inbox (I leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done" tasks, and star items I want to revisit in the distant future). On the other hand, I have grown so accustomed to Gmail's conversation view that there is no way I can give it up, even for a really good service, and it doesn't look like Mail Pilot has this feature.

Gmail's conversation view is in my opinion a nearly insurmountable barrier to entry for other companies. 1) It's a tough natural language processing task, which means startups have trouble with it. 2) It requires someone algorithmically reading all my emails, which means it's such a PR nightmare to even try it that only Google is willing to weather the storm.

"It does a lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's priority inbox (I leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done" tasks, and star items I want to revisit in the distant future)."

I solved this problem by no longer using my email as a task management tool. Emails that contain a new task get forwarded to Asana, where tasks are easier to deal with. This approach is closer to the Unix philosophy of narrowly scoped tools that can be effectively combined, and it's a philosophy that hasn't failed me yet.

"Gmail's conversation view is ... a tough natural language processing task"

Is it? How is it more than a different way of presenting threads?

Technically, it is like threads, but it includes messages from other directories that belong to the thread, thus showing you the whole coversation including your answers and archived messages.

Graphically, it shows all the messages in a continuous stream as opposed to only one message at a time. Since you now see all responses at once, there is no need for quoting any more, so quotes are collapsed.

I don't use Gmail any more, but conversation view is all but essential for me, too.

"It's a tough natural language processing task"

It doesn't seem to be. For most part, it's the same e-mail headers that every other e-mail client uses to show threads: http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

Sounds like Outlook to me? Ie, being careful of which emails to mark as read ("complete"), setting up reminders for later on individual emails, taking a message and adding it to a to-do list, etc...

Or what would this offer that Outlook does not (other than not being a MS product). I'm being serious, not a smart ass. I would love to be able to leave Outlook...

I signed up oblivious to the fact that they were going to present a forced checkout step midway registration. What a sucky experience. I'm not going to spend $60 on a product I haven't even seen to a company who's policies I don't even know (information is very skimpy).

On second thought I realized that letting a startup deal with my email is the exact opposite of what I want. It already sucks that we have to trust email providers with our communications, let alone let in another 3rd party that's a startup. Sticking with Thunderbird. I would like a better email client though.

I really can't understand why there is no trial period, maybe even for 14 days.

Does anyone know where we can find actual user reviews of this? I like the ballsiness of requiring payment just to see the beta, but I don't know what I'm getting for my $60.

I tried to sign up but it kept telling me my password was not good enough, although I was sure to include the required characters.

Yes, I really hate this. I was going to pay the $60 but just because of their current password rule I decided against it.

I get your sarcasm. I missed the gotta pay to try, I thought I was signing up for a trial or a beta.

My complaint isn't that they have a password rule, it's that my password met the requirements but they obviously are looking for something other than what they are rejecting mine on. I suspect it was length, but by then I was tired of trying to guess.

No, I'm serious. The password rule turned me away.

I'd love to know the reasoning behind the archaic password requirements. As a rule there's absolutely no way I'm changing my extremely secure password just for their app.

Horrible JPEG compression http://www.mailpilot.co/images/img5.jpg

Your "Get Started" call to action should be an anchor/input/button with corresponding active/hover states.

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