Mailbird – helping people manage email better | Hacker News Reader

Mailbird – helping people manage email better

sdasia.co

13 pointschristelb8 comments

I will be honest, I don't really understand who this product is aimed at.

It's Windows only, but they're not going after Outlook. And it's not actively going after webmail based users.

So that leaves a small minority of users? Of the people I know who use email on Windows exclusively they either user Outlook or webmail. There's the odd user on Thunderbird, but that's about it.

If I'm missing something I'd like to be educated..

I tried it because I dislike Outlook (for reasons I won'd go into). I like Thunderbird but I've historically had a lot of trouble getting my calendar to sync properly to Google calendar (sometimes it works fine, other times it gives me mysterious "failed to write" errors).

Since Thunderbird development seemed to have slowed to a crawl, I thought I'd try a product with a company standing behind it:

- A few months ago I tried PostBox. The e-mail piece worked great but it crashed as soon as I tried to use the Lightning calendar plugin. Their response was that Lightning isn't provided by them so I should take it up with the developers of Lightning. Having the problem dumped back on my lap was what I was trying to avoid by paying for a product that a company stands behind (fortunately I was still in the free trial period).

- Then I tried Mailbird. It's a fun-feeling product which supports Google calendar integration (and other 3rd party integrations) but it couldn't handle event invitations from Outlook, which makes it something of a non-starter for anyone looking to use it in most business settings. They were responsive to my inquiries, however and said that feature should be available in version 2.0 so I'll probably give it another try then.

"Or target market are people who are very much productivity seekers, they like to control their email using a native applications that does not distract them when they have to log in and out of the emails. We’re just aiming for people who don’t want to log in using a browser to check their mails every single time."

It seems to be aimed at increasing productivity for users with multiple accounts while remaining usable. I think they're mainly aiming at businesses with this, something like small business sales perhaps.

Love Mailbirds, been having them from the very beginning. And now it's been much better. Love the interface and how easy it is to use. And it helps when you need to reply an email at home with no internet access.

I didn't see anything from the demo video that I can't already do in Gmail.

Not in the video but here is something that is not in the webmail - http://www.getmailbird.com/easter-speed-read-inbox-zero/

Offline access, and multi account support for both POP3 and IMAP accounts - one interface that is well designed and much faster. Saving tons of time - speeding up the process of emailing with features like quick reply, quick compose, in-line reply, speed reader, linkedin lookup for business relationships and the apps are awesome. And I can just turn on the ones I want - so it is also customized for my email usage needs to foster a productive work flow.

I love Mailbird. Seriously the best looking, functioning, performing email experience I've ever had on Windows machines. Also, super pumped for the anticipated release of Mailbird 2.0 :D

I've found Gmail's offline and multi account support to be pretty sufficient for me. I'm mostly just curious. There do seem to be some cool things here, but I'm probably not going to be convinced to use a desktop client regardless. (And I can't in this case since I'm not a Windows user.)

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