
Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations - richardesigns
Hello HN! Plum Mail (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plummail.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plummail.co</a>) is a messaging app that gives you better conversation features than email and instant messengers. These features help make conversations more useful and easier to get value from.<p>Today we&#x27;re launching Plum Mail in early access. You can join our Wait List to be one of the early users by emailing yesplease@plummail.co.<p>Email is disorganised, instant messaging is distracting and group chats are hard to keep track of. But email is great, because everyone has an email address. Why can’t we build an awesome messaging platform that lets us keep our email addresses? Our insight: keep the email
address but replace the emails with something better.<p>The first thing we want to fix is group conversations. Conversations between three or more people in email get messy quickly. We can solve that with the ability to break off-topic messages out into sub-threads or the ability to conclude a thread. We’re working on the ability to highlight text and pin it to a noticeboard so important pieces of information don’t get lost in high message volume.<p>To help solve the issue of distraction created by platforms such as Slack, we’re introducing features like inbox delay, group chat message rate limits, and a complete lack of notification noises. Our design philosophy is respect and simplicity. We do not want to nudge you to check your inbox with things like red dots or read receipts.<p>We are also offering greater control over adding and removing people from conversation threads. Here’s a demo video showing some of this in action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Yf-82ychDgA&amp;t=6s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Yf-82ychDgA&amp;t=6s</a><p>Peter and I started Plum Mail because we had these problems with email and IM ourselves. Group chats quickly get out of hand. We find it really hard to organise our annual ski trips with friends in Whatsapp. Half our mates just want to share <i>hilarious</i>
GIFs that smother the conversation we’re trying to have about dates or hotels or ski hire. I love a funny GIF as much as the next guy so we probably just need to think about where the funny GIFs live and where the details about our hotel reservations live. i.e, not on top of each other.<p>We also have 12 months&#x27; experience working exclusively on passwordless authentication technologies in our company DID.app. We realised that the marriage of passwordless authentication with a common messaging platform could be a happy one.<p>Our vision for Plum Mail is to position it alongside other premium inbox products on the market to people that care about new features enabling them to have great quality conversations online. However, Plum Mail will remain open and accessible to all at some level so that users can enjoy the freedom of writing to anyone (whether they’re a user or not) whilst enjoying the clear benefits of messaging inside a common system instead of over email protocol.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts. In particular, what do you dislike about either email or instant messaging? Anything goes! This feels to us like an opportunity to re-imagine how communication online can work.
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anderspitman
> email is great, because everyone has an email address

I've been thinking lately that the ability to send messages is perhaps the
less interesting role of email. The real value comes from providing globally
unique, federated identities. It's not perfect but it's pretty dang good.

If for no other reason, this is why Slack or any other closed system will
never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to
the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only)
way to recover an account.

~~~
crowdhailer
Not setting up another walled garden is really important to us. Otherwise we
just end up with the situation of another competing platform, as is well
explained in this xkcd comic. [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

We hope people will like being able to keep using their email address but get
more features they are used to in other more modern platforms.

------
smt88
I may be in the minority, but there's no way I'm using this if it's cloud-
based and requires access to my full inbox.

When your main inbox is also your second factor of authentication for many
services, your backup to your work accounts, and a repository of _lots_ of
financial and medical information, it's too scary to share with a cloud
service. You could have 100% great intentions and still get hacked.

~~~
crowdhailer
We do not require any access to your inbox, messages sent directly to your
email do not pass through our service.

Messages within Plum Mail, are stored on our servers. Central coordination is
what enables us to offer features like concluding a conversation and pins that
show the same state to all participants.

It is a fair concern, one that always needs to be considered when using a
cloud service, it is certainly possible to have the convenience of Plum Mail
for some conversations and keep financial/medical sent directly to your email
for peace of mind.

~~~
fishywang
Wait. I might be reading your comment wrong or missing something, but my
understanding from your comment is that you are just using email addresses as
the identities of a group chat system, instead of actually using emails as the
group chat?

~~~
crowdhailer
You are correct that email addresses are identifiers in our system, and that
emails themselves are not the core mechanism within the app.

However this approach allows us to have features that would not be possible in
just emails, but still have fallback interactions via emails to users not yet
on the platform.

~~~
smt88
I perceived the product incorrectly, just like GP did.

The people I know who don't use Slack yet are mostly older and mostly use
Outlook. I think they'd be confused and irritating if we sent them emails with
the frequency of chat.

Especially phone email notifications are not tuned to correctly handle instant
messages.

I have often dreamed of a similar concept, but have never been able to work
the UX out in my mind. Hopefully you have. Best of luck!

~~~
richardesigns
You're so right. They would get hugely annoyed. Plum Mail isn't a messenger
really, I mean sure you could use it as such but then you could use email like
that too and cause just as many notifications.

We're planning daily digest emails to group together multiple messages with
individual reply buttons.

Showed it and explained it to my gran and she seemed to get it just fine. This
is a woman that couldn't understand why her iPad wasn't charging until I
explained it did actually need plugging into the wall. lol.

I think anyone would get confused and irritated by some weird confusion over
email and Plum Mail. I think the next step is to ship v1 and see how users get
on with it. I'll try to remember to report back what we learn.

------
jedberg
I watched the demo video and I'm intrigued! It's like a better interface for
group conversations. Some feedback/questions based solely on the demo:

\- Will I be able to see who has notifications on or off?

\- Relatedly, if someone has notifications off, is there way a way to notify
them anyway?

Say for example during the branding discussion they've decided to use Pears
instead of Plums, and they want to bring you back into the conversation to
make sure that you won't veto that choice before they get too far along.

\- If someone who is not on plummail signs up, will the conversations they
were previously included in be in their inbox?

\- You should put an invite link on the bottom of the fallback emails, or at
least have it on by default and allow the sender to turn it off.

\- When you added gary@example.co there didn't seem to be any validation.
That's obviously not a valid address, so when/how would you be notified that
the message failed? Would there be a way to fix the email and resend?

\- When someone is added to the conversation I assume they get the full
history? What if they're not plummail users? Is there any indication that
you're sending to a non-plummail user so you know that they aren't seeing the
whole context? Or a away to send them the full context?

\- How do you get my inbound email? Do I forward it from gmail to you? Do you
act as my MX recipient?

~~~
crowdhailer
> Will I be able to see who has notifications on or off?

As of now you will not, but we have been asked this question by other users
and are looking for feedback on the right way forward.

> Relatedly, if someone has notifications off, is there way a way to notify
> them anyway?

We want to introduce @mentions so that in larger group conversations you can
highlight messages for a particular participant, this would notify that user
even if they were not receiving notifications for every message.

> If someone who is not on plummail signs up, will the conversations they were
> previously included in be in their inbox?

Yes

> You should put an invite link on the bottom of the fallback emails

All fallback emails allow a user, new or otherwise, to immediately access that
conversation on plum mail.

> so when/how would you be notified that the message failed? Would there be a
> way to fix the email and resend?

If we get a bounce back from an email address you will be able to see that in
the conversation.

> When someone is added to the conversation I assume they get the full
> history?

Correct, if they are added to a conversation with history, they will be able
to access the conversation from the fallback message this will give access to
all previous messages.

> How do you get my inbound email? Do I forward it from gmail to you? Do you
> act as my MX recipient?

For now we don't handle inbound emails sent directly to your inbox. plum mail
is the place for your group conversations that benefit from our unique
features. We don't see much value in forwarding other transactional emails
into plum mail. But we might look into it in the future.

------
ffpip
Congratulations on the launch!

You're trying to fix the very thing I hate about email - It sucks when it
involves more than a single entity, be it conversations, sharing stuff. It's
only good when it's a single email (login, newsletter, etc).

~~~
richardesigns
Thank you. Keen to agree with the point that email is useful and good at in
the right place but groups certainly needs work!

------
jve
Finally an answer to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641)

~~~
garrettm
Plum has some interesting ideas, if you're interested in a different approach
to this problem, check out [https://www.twobird.com](https://www.twobird.com)

Disclaimer: I work on it!

~~~
frakkingcylons
FYI your home page doesn't display quite right on Firefox:
[https://i.imgur.com/kjs0nPR.png](https://i.imgur.com/kjs0nPR.png)

~~~
garrettm
Thanks for the heads up!

~~~
frakkingcylons
Thanks for fixing it :)

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primitivesuave
Congratulations on launching. I have to say honestly my #1 feedback is the
video - it is way too long and does not convey to me the relevant details
about your product as you described above. Attention spans are short, and if
there is a broken icon image in the video (at 1:49) I will immediately stop
taking the product seriously.

Definitely agree that communication software can be improved.

~~~
richardesigns
Thanks for your constructive feedback on the video. We realised yesterday the
video says literally nothing interesting until 30 seconds in! Had quite a lot
of flak about this lol.

Still, there’s a first time for everything and I hope the video can be
succeeded by a V2 in fairly short order.

Thanks for your congratulations.

~~~
jhatax
Nice to see this on HN because someone commented that I should try Plum Mail
on one of my tweets about email [1]. The service looks quite compelling. Kudos
on the launch.

Regarding the video, may I suggest that you use the first 10-seconds as the
“trailer” for the service. The trailer should cover the top-5 unique features
—- your service’s USP —- and dive into each feature one by one for the rest of
the video. This way, you’ve hooked users of all attention spans to view the
rest of your video. This is similar to an executive summary, only in video
form!

Good luck. I’ll sign up for an invite.

1\.
[https://twitter.com/_adontai/status/1296512040442433538?s=21](https://twitter.com/_adontai/status/1296512040442433538?s=21)

Update: punctuation and minor clarification

~~~
richardesigns
Thanks Adontai. Agree on the video. Not made a video like this before! It was
a fun experience but there are certainly improvements to be made there. Thank
you.

------
kfk
Do you have any plans around QnA functionalities? Enterprise users send me a
lot of emails and it would be great to be able to promote some of the answers
from me or my team to a knowledge base. Users could also send new questions
from your search bar which would give them previously answered topics as they
type the subject

~~~
crowdhailer
That is an interesting idea, and not one we have yet thought about. I would be
interested to talk more about it with you.

~~~
kfk
Feel free to email me

------
portmanteaufu
Some feedback for you:

* The features you're advertising are compelling! Pinning and conclusions are very interesting.

* As I read through this announcement, perused the website, and watched the demo on YouTube I was nearly driven to madness trying to understand how Plum Mail relates to email. It's not email, but it uses email addresses, has an inbox, and lets me email people. The cognitive dissonance I experienced reminded me of the old SNL sketch _That 's Not Yogurt_[1]. If this truly isn't email, I suggest trying to be crisper about what why that's the case.

[1] [https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/thats-not-
yogu...](https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/thats-not-
yogurt/n10291)

~~~
crowdhailer
Thanks for those points, we're trying hard to succinctly explain what we do.

We start by saying it's not email because it's easy to think plum mail is yet
another email client, which it isn't.

plum mail hosts the conversations so it can manage the state of pinning,
conclusions etc.

email addresses are just a user identifier it will email people if they are
not on plum mail, so we don't require someone to be on plum mail for you to
start talking to them.

~~~
jve
> email addresses are just a user identifier

Email as a protocol I suppose. On top of which some other protocol implemented
to provide additional features.

Thanks for doing it.

~~~
richardesigns
Sound summary. You're welcome.

------
webmons
Congrats on the launch.

Was pulling my hair out trying to coordinate tasks in applying for a mortgage
between me, my wife, the banker, the insurance company and the title people. I
thought to myself it'd be great to have something like shared inbox but for
personal use.

Would love to test this

~~~
ceonyc
Separately, why there isn't a tool used by the mortgage broker to facilitate
this, I have no idea. It's a nightmare of documents and tasks that makes the
whole process 8 times as long.

~~~
brandnewlow
There’s a million tools like this out there but brokers just want to get deals
closed so they fall back to whatever is preferred by the borrower which is
always email.

------
cassepipe
This would reconcile with email but for one thing : In my social group nobody
uses emails to communicate, because of the very problems you're trying to
solve. Meaning I would need to get my friend on the service or else it won't
be a very efficient tool to communicate. It is although quite unclear that you
act as an email provider and not an app that accesses your emails (Did I even
get that right?). It is also unclear if there's a price tag or how you intend
to make money.

~~~
richardesigns
Agree. A system with none of your friends or colleagues on is pointless
because there is no one to talk to.

I'll try to be really clear about what Plum Mail is and is not! We haven't
done a great job of communicating this thus far.

Plum Mail is NOT an email client.

Plum Mail IS a communication platform using a central server similar to how an
instant chat platform works.

Where we differ is that Plum Mail isn't a 'walled garden' where you need to
invite users in to use it.

Users are identified in the system by their email address. If you write to
someone that is not a Plum Mail user, then we send that message out as an
email to that user with an option to reply. That reply button gives the user
immediate access to Plum Mail in order to write back to you. We're doing this
passwordlessly. Right at the genesis of this idea we didn't want to build a
system that required you to invite all your friends to it before it became
useful.

Revenue wise, referencing the above point, Plum Mail has to be free. We will
offer premium features for a modest fee.

~~~
cassepipe
Thanks for the explanations!

------
DanielKehoe
Interesting. Could Plum Mail be suitable for communication in an open source
community? There's a range of group communication platforms, including email
newsletters, Slack channels, and Discord (and originally email lists and
UseNet) that can be either distracting, hard to search, difficult to thread,
or difficult to join. Is there a mechanism for people to invite themselves to
a Plum Mail conversation from a sign-up form?

~~~
chromedev
Why would you want to use a closed-source solution for an open-source
solution? Zulip, Mattermost, Matrix, Rocket.Chat all seem like more ideal
communication and community platforms. There is also Odoo that handles CRM/ERP
type solutions.

~~~
crowdhailer
We have a different focus than most chat services.

Zulip and others can only be used within one team, we want to build a system
that can be used for all conversations, hence the fallback emails sent to
people not yet on plum mail.

We also are trying to choose features that encourage less frequent, more
productive conversations, not be just another chat interface

~~~
aero31aero
Interesting part about Zulip is it is really amazing for less frequent users.
I usually come back to 3000+ unread messages and catch up on all conversations
that I find relevant (thanks to stream>topic hierarchy and Recent Topics
view).

Also, its trivial to have multiple teams on the same Zulip org, people are
just subscribed to different sets of streams. So, say you have two teams:
mobile and desktop, for example. You can have streams prefixed with that name:

#mobile-hangout #mobile-issues #mobile-support

OR

#m-hangout #m-issues #m-support

Good conventions for stream naming makes it really natural for multiple mostly
isolated teams to exist on the same Zulip org, and share some streams like
#announce, #general, etc that everyone is subscribed to.

------
crispyporkbites
Does this use SMTP under the hood? I.e. can I join in a group conversation
without signing up to a proprietary system?

~~~
richardesigns
SMTP is not used under the hood. You can send messages to anyone with an email
address. That person may not have accessed Plum Mail before. In that case, the
message sent to that person is sent as an email with the option to reply.

So you can stay within your email to take part in that conversation or you can
access it in Plum Mail for the full feature set.

------
weedpeg
Congratulations on the launch! Watched the video and loved it :) 1\. Quote and
Pin are definitely super useful. 2\. It would be great if there is a way to
click on quote/pin and corresponding mail in the thread opens for more
context.

~~~
richardesigns
Thanks so much :-) The pins will definitely do this. I didn't quite manage to
get it to work ahead of the video but the idea is each pin is a link back to
the message from where it was pinned.

I'd like the same to be true for the quote. So much easier than writing 'I'll
reply in line' and the copy/pasting all the time.

------
gregwebs
This reminds me a lot of aether pro which is also a backwards-compatible email
enhancer. Their main feature seems to be Slack-like channels.
[https://aether.app/](https://aether.app/)

~~~
crowdhailer
Cool product, thanks for sharing. It looks like it's focused on inter team
communication. plum mail is somewhere you can talk to anyone who's email you
already have.

------
prawn
Seems laborious to manually pin details from an email. Could Plum or the
sender automatically suggest pins? Eg, any bold text? When I email people, I
often bold key things so they can skim and get the details immediately.

~~~
richardesigns
Yes it could. That's a little way down the road development wise but sure,
cool idea. Version 2 of the pins will include links back to the text in the
email thread. If you've got 100 messages in a thread this is essential.

The skimming you mention is the level of efficiency we are trying to get to.
i.e. surfacing the key pieces of information.

------
maxpert
Is it just me getting bothered or somebody noticed that too? Quote and pin had
broken image links. O come on! You never do demo with broken images!

------
bluesign
This reminds me of Google Wave little bit.

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arrty88
A feature rich google group? Awesome!

~~~
crowdhailer
We offer more features than would be possible with an email group. plum mail
hosts the conversation and certain features like pinning require a user to
interact with the conversation within plum mail.

------
motu
How does this compare to Outpost? teamoutpost.com

~~~
richardesigns
Nice looking site. Plum Mail just isn't an email client or a shared inbox. We
can offer shared inbox functionality in Plum Mail if users would like it but
you can also do simpler public support channels.

------
WiF3cap7ShUth4
Look like "The messenger - Delta Chat".

~~~
richardesigns
Similar in that you can contact anyone with their email address without that
person needing to 'sign up'. This openess is important.

The format in Plum Mail is more longform rather than chat as such. Delta Chat
is a cool service.

