Show HN: My attempt to take a crack at Todos from your email

I have been a fan of inbox zero for a long time, well before the buzz started. I had trained myself to effectively use gmail labels and archived to clean my inbox of non-essential emails. Then along came MailBox and Boxer and I guess many more. They were all amazing! They all understood that emails were quickly becoming peoples todo boxes. Vacation tickets and reservations, information about the parties you are attending this weekend, a report you need to send to your manager and the list went on and on. They are the pioneers in bringing the concept of “inbox zero” and email todo management. I quickly switched from my manual inbox zero to MailBox App when it came out and then to Boxer app (story follows). It all made sense!

However,

Mailbox has a server side component. When you snooze something to remind you in “3 days”, as far as I understand, the Mailbox server side actually switches the labels between mailbox/todo to inbox and vice-versa. This is a good trick, however, very early on, Mailbox app had server side scaling issues and syncing couldn’t be maintained (at least for me). They of course figured out the problems and I am sure things are fine and dandy. I had more than three big hiccups though. I personally manage around 7 email accounts and things tend to get hectic.

Enter BoxerApp. I switched to BoxerApp and even paid the 10 bucks. Boxer is a great app and has no server side component. This makes it great in terms of not having to deal with a serverside scaling issues. However you give up the functionality that mailbox offers. Emails no longer are snoozed. You can attach a time to remind you of the email and it will show up in your todo dashboard.

Both Mailbox and Boxer have a very easy to use UX and UI design, which made it a delight to use.

Meanwhile iOS 7 came along, out of the box Mail App and Gmail app were becoming more mature. What i started realizing is that in the quest of inbox zero, I was sacrificing extremely fast and slick email apps.

During the last two years, I have preached inbox zero to all my friends and family. One thing I realized is none of them saw the value immediately. Some upon my insistence gave MailboxApp a try and gave up. Unanimously the feedback I got was, they all found it stressful to keep up but everyone of them did tell me that they did have most of their todos in their email. Some actually emailed themselves “buy milk”.

At the end of all this I realized

I wanted to use other apps like gmail or iOS mail app. I did want to manage my todos in my email. My statistical research pool (not in the 1000s but more than a 100) indicated that they did want to have a todo list out of their email but did not really want to either do “inbox zero” or replace their current inbox app. This is where MailDo came along. I have been working on the app on and off for a while now. It’s been a hobby more than anything else. My goals with MailDo were:

Make a good todo list out of my email with reminders. Make my todos available offline NOT try to replace my inbox app Work along side of any other app you might use or even your own gmail labels, including mailbox or boxer app I created MailDo with the following features (for now)

Ability to add time to an email and get push notifications to remind. No Server side component. Pick multiple gmail labels as your todos. Ability to add a note on a email thread. I know emails are the todos but I felt after 15 emails back and forth, I would rather have a small post-it style note on the thread that would quickly summarize what my “todo” is. A lot of the UI elements are very similar to Mailbox and Boxer and IOS Mail app. Ideally, I wanted to be more creative here but I feel that the industry standard on this UI aspect is pretty much set. Any new UI would not be adding any value, it might be detrimental. Its like trying to reinvent “pull to refresh”. You know when something works!

I personally don’t think MailDo is a real business(happened to read this the other day). Its just a feature app, its going to stay that way but I am going to focus on the “todo” part of the email system and keep making this app better. I feel there is a lot of intelligent stuff to do in this space.

Would love some feedback in the comments section and rating the app would be a great as well!

I fully intend on sharing pretty much every metric about the app in future post, if the app magically gets downloaded by statistically relevant numbers.

Thank you.