SlideMail (YC W15) Is an Intelligent Email App for the Rest of Us | Hacker News Reader

SlideMail (YC W15) Is an Intelligent Email App for the Rest of Us

techcrunch.com

21 pointsvu0tran7 comments

My honest feedback:

What differentiates this from Mailbox or Google Inbox?

On the UI side, its a pretty clear clone of Mailbox (I saw you work with one of their designers, so not surprising — also not a bad thing since Mailbox has a great paradigm.)

I see you're focused on personalization. Google's priority inbox does exactly what you talked about, prioritizing those messages you're more likely to read.

Following up on that, if I'm not a power user (your target market) then do I have the email volume to justify personalization? Sure, maybe I have a bunch of new things in the Promotions tab in the morning, but I'm not sure that is a hair-on-fire problem for self-identifying non-power-users.

I was in the same question asking boat as you after checking everything out and the only conclusion I can come to is that this app may have been created with people who don't want to attach everything to Google's Services.

Possibly. At the same time, Mailbox supports iCloud and gMail. They say SlideMail is different in that it is not for power users. So non-power-users that have their own email server or don't use gMail/iCloud?

Maybe people that don't want Dropbox to have access to your email, which is fair. In which case, push privacy as a differentiator. But that isn't nearly as sexy or mass-market as personalization; I think many average users have gotten used to their online information being own by someone else.

Hi guys,

Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Whenever we see a crash report, it feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!

Were you not a startup from the s14 yc batch? Title says w15

Looks pretty interesting, especially storing mails locally.

For promoting privacy, the app unfortunately sends way too many requests to Heap Analytics (basically every touch you do within the app).

Even worse, the app sends the mail address you entered via plain HTTP to a Heroku app (for figuring out mailserver configuration).

This is what the request looks like:

>> GET http://slidemailstaging.herokuapp.com/validate_email/abc@exa... <- 200 application/json 173B

Once you reduce analytics and send stuff like this via HTTPS (or even better ask me whether I want to send my mail address to your server), I'd be happy to try the app.

Definitely looks like a killer feature of recommending emails to archive as soon as you open the app.

When you're looking for Android beta testers let me know :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com