Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released on the Mac App Store

Changing email clients is a major chore, and I suspect that there's a good chance I might return to my boring old mail client after the initial delight of the new client wears off... With those odds, paying $10 for software that I probably won't end up using is not appealing.

Also, I feel that the word "beautiful" should be banished from app marketing copy. There are many things in this world that are beautiful, but I hope my threshold for beauty never gets so low that a grid view of email attachments would qualify -- that sounds like a state of mental disorder, experiencing Stendhal syndrome when faced with a GUI.

Close friends I contact via SMS mostly, and other friends I contact maybe twice every 6 months.

Maybe my email usage is unusual, I don't know. Still, Unibox's market is a niche. Good luck to them though. It's always interesting to see new approaches towards a medium as old as email.

I have a few criticism after actually using it (admittedly for only a few minutes here):

* The lack of an "Inbox" is disconcerting. It actually really is important to me to just see a list of emails in my inbox, most recent on top, with unread messages marked as such.

* People centric is great, but conversation centric is equally important. Apple Mail and Gmail get high marks on organizing emails by conversation thread, but both I found lacking in their organization by person. This app has the opposite problem: It's great for viewing emails by person, but that's like the ONLY feature. I really strongly dislike how it munges together different conversation threads under a person, which at the same time excludes other emails from other people that were part of that thread.

Maybe they'll add these features later but for now I'll probably slink back to Apple Mail and maybe keep an eye on it.

YMMV

Only drawbacks I've found so far: search seems to make it go a bit sluggish and it's not that easy to actually find what you're after. I seem to have sent it into some kind of spin by hitting the sync button which brought up this error:

An error occured while syncing account [redacted] (2001):

Could not parse command

Overall though, I'm liking it and I'll give it a go as my primary email client for a while to see if it can replace Mail for me.

Great to finally see some people adopting a similar approach to us, however the real trick is figuring out the balance between threads and people. Simply grouping emails by people doesn't work for most professionals who often have threads with multiple people. This is one problem that's taken us years to solve - and only now we finally have an algo that gets the right balance I believe.

Interesting fact - Post.fm used to be called unipost.com, so unibox is a very interesting name :)

The abstract root of the problem with "let's reinvent email clients" to me is this: There are things that I want to do in email and things I do not want to do in email. The "attachments reinvented" (really?) is such an example: Sure, you could show all the attachments for one person in one place. But when would I use that? In most cases what I want to do is move data out of email and get them where they are useful. Gluing them closer to the emails solves no problem for me.

I get that this is all social and everything, so as somebody who mostly uses email for work, I'm not the target audience. But either you mostly work stuff with emails (then this fails on a number of fronts), or you do mostly social... no wait, you don't do mostly social with emails. That's the problem. And that's why most email clients are not very satisfying for one particular use - because serving multiple uses at the same time simply is a dirty business.

Sorry to fall into the typical HN snark here, but that's how I feel: It does look nice, but so could a thunderbird theme.

Footnotes:

- "Sent with Unibox", really?

- No overview window (at least none shown - do I have to click through the people sidebar to find a recent email if I'm not sure what I'm searching for?)

- mentioning "Exchange" - be very careful here, saying that you support Exchange sets a very specific set of expectations that I'm pretty sure you cannot meet. In any case, you're probably inviting in customers that you don't want and it could cost you a lot of time and money to deal with them.

1. Unibox based around contacts

2. Mail Pilot based around to-do lists

Would be nice if topic-centric could be added.