Mail Pilot App | Hacker News Reader

Mail Pilot App

mailpilot.co

49 pointsdhruvbhatia59 comments

I've really wanted to like this app, and to try it, but the reviews on the App Store are absolutely appalling - most complaining that the app is effectively useless. This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Add to that the fact that I tweeted the MailPilot twitter account many times about this and never got a single reply, and this is a definite NO PURCHASE.

I really want to find that this app is great, but I'm not willing to ignore a mountain of evidence just because this is what I want to believe. Caveat Emptor, Buyer Beware.

Has anyone here actually used MailPilot sufficiently to counter those numerous negative AppStore reviews?

Don't pay for the iOS version. I was one of those people who ignored the reviews and went and splashed out on it after a while using the OSX version (Which works perfectly fine). Emails would come in hours, sometimes days after they where sent, others wouldn't show at all.

I noticed on their website they are advising to wait for version 2.

I've tried and failed to use the OS X version. It's close to impossible to tell the difference between an email that I've read and an email that I haven't read. So I went back to Airmail.

> This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Everyone says the $ 20 or so are a steep price, but I paid twice that for Mailmate[1] and it's worth every drop.

It's probably my most used app after Sublime Text (to which it integrates, by the way) and It repaid itself after a couple hours of stress-free operation.

Granted, people lament that this app doesn't work well, but my point is that, as pervasive as mail is, every small bit of improvement in this area may could end up greatly multiplied. $ 20 may be much for a "useless" piece of software, but I think it's wrong to start with that as a general assumption for a mail app.

[1]: Mailmate: http://freron.com/

Mailmate has a trial version that works fine for 30 days. I actually did try it, though I ended up going for AirMail instead... and then went back to Mail.app!

I don't mind paying $20 or more for a great email client - I mind paying that for a shitty email client that fails at even basic stuff like, you know, receiving emails.

Hope this one day becomes fast / stable enough that peers start recommending it.

As part of the original Kickstarter backing - I gave up on this product long ago because of numerous issues.

For those who like Mail.app: MailTags has been around for years, and adds tags/labels, notes, and reminders to Mail.app. One of the nice things about MailTags is that it stores its information in a header in the e-mail on the IMAP[1][2] server. So, it does not funnel your mail through a server and the tags show up on all your Macs.

http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html

I thought it was worthwhile mentioning, since I hadn't seen this plugin until a few months ago.

[1] This does not work with GMail, since it stores a new copy of the e-mail with the extra headers and then deletes the old one. GMail recognizes the new copy as a duplicate and never stores it.

[2] I am not sure if they take any security precautions, since a sender could add the header as well. Would be fun to try I guess :).

I tried to use MailTags, tried really hard. But it never achieved its promise. First, tagging E-mail was just too much of a hassle, second, there were bugs and issues and I spent a lot of time with support to try to resolve those, and third, there just wasn't that much utility, especially given the speed of Mail.app's search window on SSD drives.

I stopped using MailTags and never looked back, although the remains haunt me to this day (Spotlight complains about mail header problems).

I would not recommend MailTags, unless you enjoy spending time tagging your E-mail and have some spare time for support conversations.

I am still on the fence. I like it generally and it's easy to tag quickly with shortcuts. It's Mail.app that bothers me, because its shortcuts are annoying (even with GMailinator) and IMO it's slow (even on SSDs).

Now that there is a great mutt version that supports notmuch (mutt-kz) I might abandon Mail.app. But for now, MailTags keeps it bearable :).

Glad to see they don't feel the need to funnel all your mail through their servers like Mailbox did.

Is it secure & private?

Mail Pilot never stores, processes, or transmits your data through third-party servers. Your account details, passwords, and personal data are securely stored on your device. All communication occurs directly between your device and your email server.

Which they can't prove since it's closed source.

well Google can't prove it isn't sending all our e-mails to our underground reptilian overloads either, right?

People doing this sort of thing tend to get caught, and besides, these guys seem to be in the app business, not in the service business.

You fairly trivially prove this with a network analyzer like Wireshark - just check to make sure mail requests are directly coming from and going to your mail server.

They probably aren't lying. And if they were, it would be trivially possible to demonstrate that the app doesn't send data to a third-party server in general use. And it would be discovered pretty quickly.

There is no way—even with open source software—to prove that and app isn't sending data to a third party. Unless you are going to build all of your hardware from raw materials, and build your own software by hand, using a bootstrapped compiler that you wrote yourself. In machine code.

Given the above, it's obvious that there has to be a level of trust involved at some point in the process. The majority of people using open-source software aren't building it themselves, and so the trust issue would still be there if the software was open. Who's to say they wouldn't provide a binary that shipped your data off, without including that code in the open release?

IOW, your predictable shallow response adds precisely zero value to the discussion about how to ensure privacy in software.

One can easily sniff what is transmitted from their app and to which end.

In most cases I'm much more concerned about companies being incompetent than malicious.

I trust them not to include a mail-stealing backdoor (which would likely be noticed quickly), but I don't trust them to secure my mail on their servers.

This conversation reminds me of Reflections on Trusting Trust, an interesting short paper originally given as a Turing Award acceptance speech: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html.

Have you found a way to generate an actual proof from source code? I'd like to use it to eliminate all bugs from my code.

Besides which, you can verify what servers it connects to in such a trivial way (1 minute tops) that digging through source code would be stupid.

Still no support for Exchange. Sigh.

I know it's a PITA to work with, but let's face it, the business opportunity is huge.

* Fancy mail clients for IMAP/POP: hundreds.

* Fancy mail clients for Exchange: zero.

* Every Exchange account out there is a corporate/business user, which means s/he is much easier to monetize (and on a large scale).

Inb4 "Exchange is proprietary-closed-blablabla": Mail.app works fine with it, so it can be done. Clearly it's just too boring for the cool kids to hack on.

most people at my job want to leave ms outlook for Mac and mail.app but alas no exchange support on their favorite clients.

AirMail works for exchange. Not perfect by a long shot, but I prefer it over Outlook for Mac.

Apple Mail works fine through Exchange Web Services, I don't know what you need to enable those on the server though.

You need a paid license to use ActiveSync, which is why there is so little support.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/IP...

You don't have to use Active Sync. You can also use Exchange Web Services. I believe Apple Mail and modern Outlook clients use EWS to talk to Exchange. Not aware of any others though.

Exactly. I use Apple Mail through EWS.

We're in the email space too (in Europe).

While I agree with the user need, convincing corporation managers (aka CIOs) to use "fancy" email tools is extremely hard and probably the main reason Outlook sticks around.

Unless you want to sell the tools directly to end users, but then you're seen as "evil" by the CIO.

BYOD is on the rise (thanks to mobile devices), so selling to end user is much easier than it used to be.

As people upgrade their Exchange servers or switch to the MS cloud, lots of SOAP endpoints will be there for everyone else to talk to.

I bought both the Mac app and the iOS app immediately, for one simple reason: this is an effort to attack the "mail problem" that actually shows promise.

We live in a world with broken E-mail [1], and there are very few attempts to fix it. And it turned out that very few people are willing to pay for better E-mail. Well, given how much time I spend on E-mail and how useful it can be, I am one of those people willing to pay.

I bought the apps even though the iOS one couldn't even work with my (Linux-based, dovecot) IMAP server. I don't mind, I want these guys to take the money and develop the apps.

Here's hoping they won't sell the company tomorrow to an evil giant who will shut the whole operation down.

[1] Just off the top of my head, some broken aspects of today's E-mail: HTML E-mail, crappy threading, broken quoting, top-posting, problems with attachments, attachment sizes, mail sorting…

I don't think there is any effort to attack any "mail problem" since this is for Mac only. No, this is just another company trying to make money out of making emails beautiful for set of users in the computer-industry.

> I bought the apps even though the iOS one couldn't even work with my (Linux-based, dovecot) IMAP server.

I have a colleague who analysed the Mail Pilot IMAP conversation and managed to hand-craft his Dovecot IMAP folders just right so that the app worked with his VPS. IIRC it was a problem with the app being really picky about IMAP namespaces.

The same problem meant that the app didn't work with Fastmail, but despite having been informed of the bug the Mail Pilot team blamed Fastmail and 'non-compliant IMAP implementations'.

The Fastmail response was a classic: show us where the bug is in our implementation and we'll fix it in a week. There was no response.

I think I'll forgo the pleasure of paying for an email client who's makers believe that in the real world there is such a thing as a 'compliant IMAP implementation'.

Heartbleed did the world a favor: it reminded us that you can't throw encryption on top of something and call it secure. Mail Oilot devs didn't seem to learn that. From their support docs at https://mailpilot.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1315088-... :

> Currently, Mail Pilot only supports normal password authentication.

> A future update (currently in development) will include support for: CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, Kerberos 4, GSSAPI, NTLM, as well as Secure Remote Password.

So while they claim to value security, the app still requires you to send your password in cleartext. There's no way my IT department would enable cleartext auth on our mail servers, and I'd be too embarrassed to ask them to.

It seems a good mail client for the Apple ecosystem.

But it's been around for some time: Why the news now?

Probably (as the title hints at) because they're working on a 'v2' for mobile devices.

I must be using email wrong. This looks a lot like Mailbox, which I couldn't successfully integrate in to my workflow (making the wait a real bummer). I normally keep my inbox at zero if possible, and carve out time at the end of the week to make sure I start Monday clean, and I base my folders around a modified GTD workflow. Getting an email "twice" (notified on receipt, then again no reminder) seems like it would add unwanted clutter to my life.

I backed this on Kickstarter (for $100 no less) and while I really want to love the apps and the system, I just don't. Not yet anyway. So many or the ideas are strong and the execution is getting better and better, but as someone who gets a few hundred inbound messages a day, it's not ther for me. Not yet.

But I love what they are trying to do and I don't regret supporting the development of this as a product that gets better moving forward.

If you guys are looking for a new experience of email management, with auto-created folders per contacts / projects available on iOS, Android and a webapp, have a look at the project me and my mates are working on: http://www.mailcloud.com/thanks

You can signup for the Beta here: http://www.mailcloud.com/

What a new experience!

I NEVER expected to go to a new startup and have them ask for my email address then send me an email saying I'm in going to get an account soon!

Amazing, you guys are so unique, not only changing the way email should be done. But also changing how internet startups should do business.

Who needs an actual product, when you have the PROMISE of a new product.

Genius! 100% Genius.

Unfortunately the fact that it doesn't appear to store any mail locally (and some appstore reviews back this up) is a non-starter for anyone (including me) who ever wants to do email on a poor connection.

I've been using Airmail [1] to do essentially everything you can do with Mailpilot, though with not as clean a UI, with pretty good success.

[1] http://airmailapp.com/

If you like the reminder functionality but don't want to switch to yet another mail application on all your devices: https://followup.cc is a great service, you can also try my own (less sophisticated but FOSS) implementation at http://www.pfalke.com

Why we again treat our mail box as a GTD list? Isn't it more convenient to use a fully functional GTD task manager such as org mode?

Email notifications are universal. Many disparate services all can push out transactional emails, which are then aggregated in one place.

To replace email, you would need to create something which is as universally adopted. Good luck!

Just bought this GTD app for both iOS and Mac, and here are some random thoughts:

It wouldn't import existing accounts from Keychain. Well, okay.

The app does not sync settings between iOS and Mac, and it appears that it is using IMAP folders for sorting e-mails. I guess that's what IMAP folders are intended for.

It would be really nice if one could create rules for sorting incoming messages. For instance, move all e-mails from "%@hidemyass.com" to folder "Proxies".

Rich text editor for composing e-mails is primitive. No indents, TAB key does not work as expected, no blue colored quote blocks.

Can't find a plaintext composing mode.

Multiple file attachments in a chain of e-mails - they all bunch up in the bottom.

Whenever I send an e-mail, I would like to set a date, by which I anticipate a response. Guess that is a reasonably obvious function which should be implemented. Perhaps I missed it.

Say, I have installed the app, but I don't want to deal with garbage older than a week. Whenever I clean up new e-mails, it loads more messages: weeks or months old. I have e-mails all the way back to year 2002 in there.

When I set "Remind me" date on iOS, it shows a segmented UIPickerView. A full-sized calendar would be much more practical.

The iOS client has just stumbled upon a certain chain of 6 e-mails, and it keeps crashing.

Is it possible to temporary quit & disable the default Mail app on iOS? Because both my Mac, iPhone and iPad are trying to open >15 connections to my $2 paid Gmail business mailbox, and all of the devices fail randomly and spam error messages. This has been most frustrating with the default Mail app, not to mention this paid alternative.

They've sent their Yacht Club newsletter invitation to an address which I've added first – it was a shared corporate box.

Searching for e-mails is done on servers at the same time: extremely slow and frustrating. Now I can only use Mail Pilot alongside Mail.app, which lets Spotlight index the attachments.

Just noticed that they're building Mail Pilot v2.

Overall, it would be nicer to have Mail Pilot as an extension to Mail.app, but instead it tries to replace it. Guys, you can store my passwords and index my inbox if you need to – just make the experience seamless, so I don't even have to think about it.

I am the author of https://emailprivacytester.com/ - But I don't have any Apple devices, so I'm unable to test this client. Would somebody please give it a test and report back here.

If you're on OSX, Airmail is a $2 Sparrow clone and is the absolute best email client I've seen, with a great/active development team.

http://airmailapp.com/

No exchange support :(. Mail Pilot looks like a great app and would love the ability to consolidate my emails under one app for mac and iOS. Currently I use Airmail for mac and Accompli for mobile.

IMO, assuming exchange support matters, Airmail on OS X and Boxer on iOS are the best choices. Airmail has been consistently improving and I have no serious complaints against it anymore.

For that price I'd want to test the app for a while first.

Agreed. $20 is also kind of steep for an app whose current version only has 2.5 stars in the app store (and 3.0 across all versions). It sounds like it crashes a lot and is missing some seemingly basic features.

Yep looks worth a try.

With the number of prior native mail app let downs, I suspect the early adopter market for mail apps is getting more wary, I am.

Totally agree. I would personally not pay $20 for the unknown.

It is strange that the same functionality is not possible to get via chrome extensions

Looks good, but it does need a trial of some kind. I'd definitely try it out.

Does it use lib MailCore?

I love the look, great design. How is it different from other mail apps?

This looks nice and all but they don't seriously expect anyone to be using this without support for signing and encrypting messages, are they?

The vast majority of people don't sign or encrypt emails, so I don't see why you'd think that.

The vast majority of people don't pay for an email client.

A niche client doesn't have an eco system full of plugins and hacks, so it better be fully featured.

The vast majority of people don't seek out or even buy alternatives. The vast majority is incapable of configuring their own mail client and usually don't have enough mail to require anything beyond what any client offers.

The people that do on the other hand and are therefore part of the potential audience are much more likely to sign and encrypt emails.

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