
Aussies' fix for 'stagnated' email  - michaelneale
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/aussies-fix-for-stagnated-email-20120221-1tkqd.html
======
citricsquid
> "The market that we're going for initially is sort of independent
> professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and]
> maybe several work accounts,"

I'm glad they're only aiming at a small group of people who actually have
problems with email. The weekly "re-invent email" posts are getting quite
tiresome, the majority of people have absolutely no problem with email, email
is an incredibly simple concept and it works for almost everyone.

~~~
tsunamifury
I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare mish-mash
of to-do list, calendar, notes, and assorted hate mail from their bosses.

In short, email is fucking awful and the bane of my existence. At one point I
was getting north of 200 emails a day from people demanding meetings, todos,
updates, and pieces of information. Please someone... reinvent it!

~~~
BillPosters
Nobody gets 200 emails per day all directly asking for something. If you do,
as already said, that's a process and staffing issue, not email's fault.

The good thing about the old subject line of an email is that you usually can
tell whether it's something you need to look at now or save for later, move to
another folder, or delete. You can also quickly see whether you are the main
target or just CC'd.

Speed reading can also assist in processing email. Sometimes you just know
whether you need to read something thoroughly, or can glance over.

~~~
tsunamifury
AS an FYI -- I was working on the largest merger between two US banks. 150-200
emails a day was a standard for many people making it almost impossible to
digest all the information.

Speed reading, as you suggest, would not be a good solution to finding
mission-critical information. As far as I know, no collaboration tool exists
that could handle the complexity that we were dealing with. We tried quite a
few, and pushed SharePoint to its limit.

------
waseemsadiq
I already built this back in 2009

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-
commun...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-
communications-stream-to-rule-them-all/)

And here is the desktop client which is now open-source:
<http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg>

People do not need this and will not leave their existing email clients
because they simply do not see email as being 'stagnated'. It works and gets
the job done.

There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is
not one of them.

My advice to you would be to go build on top of for example gmail. There are
massive number of things that suck horribly. Yes, search is one of them.

Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why
the current line based inbox interfaces work.

The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my
new startup www.fileboard.com

~~~
GnomeChomsky
Did you even read the article, or did you just come here to toot your own
horn? All of your "advice" is exactly addressed by Fluent, e.g. built on top
of Gmail, better search, better inbox navigation, and better attachment
handling.

I have no idea how successful Fluent will be at all those things, but it's
just peculiar when a site says "we're tackling problems x, y, and z" and you
come along and say, "your ideas suck, try addressing problems x, y, and z
instead."

~~~
waseemsadiq
Lol @ thinking that IMAP and gmail are the same thing

Having spent the last 3 years of my life tackling this problem I would say I
am pretty qualified to say this solution sucks.

And they are totally not solving the problems I mentioned, they are building a
new mail client. Which tends to be a completely different thing.

Anyways just my 0.02$

------
Volpe
Can we put the actual url in [1]

Looks very inspired by by Sparrow.app [2](OS X mail application). Though they
have improved on the UI in some aspects.

Great that people are still trying to make email better.

[1] <http://fluent.io>

[2] <http://sparrowmailapp.com/>

~~~
Maro
I actually purchased Sparrow, but I don't use it.

It was slow and had some UX quirks/bugs.

For a time I fired it up every once in a while as an email-backup solution,
but I got lazy so I don't even do that now.

~~~
Maro
Eg. I usually have Gmail open in other browsers in Windows even if I run
Sparrow on the Mac, and it takes several minutes for Sparrow to notice that a
message has already been read, which is super annoying.

------
liuhenry
Congrats to Fluent! Great design and a slick UI.

The stream view is an interesting concept, but we've found that many people
don't have a nice inbox of messages as shown in the preview. In fact, it's
quite the opposite: messages from friends, family, and coworkers are often
overwhelmed by notifications, newsletters, and mailing lists. However, your
Amazon shipping and Twitter notifications aren't spam, you just don't want to
see them in the same context.

I'm working on Glider (<http://glider.io>), a fix for the mess in your inbox.
You already know which kinds of emails are important to you, so instead of
obscuring that information, we think the best solution is to sort and display
emails by sender and context.

We did a soft launch on HN a few weeks ago
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917>), and would love to know what
you guys think. Good luck as well to the Fluent team!

~~~
troels
A word of advise: Asking me to give you access to my email account is a very
big leap of trust. I can't see what your product does without taking that leap
- so I don't.

~~~
__jochen__
I quite agree that it takes trust. We do have a demo up for a safe hands-on
with the product (demo.fluent.io). We certainly take your privacy seriously.
Here's a bit more on that: <http://fluent.io/privacy.html>

~~~
jmarbach
"We are well versed in industry-leading privacy practices." \- What is your
country of jurisdiction (i.e. what government can access my email)? Google is
based in the US and you are in Australia.

------
jacques_chester
"we sort of present you with the information that you need _to immediately
action on it_."

Really? _Really?_

I expect better from my fellow Australians, even if they _are_ Sydney-siders.

~~~
dhanji
Fwiw, that's the SMH reporter misquoting us from an in-person interview.

However, we'll try to live up to Australian standards better in the future =)

~~~
jacques_chester
Then I retract my slur on Sydney and all her works.

Except for the journalists.

(What did you actually say, in your recollection?)

~~~
BenGrubb
FWIW, it was the original quote <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26309/action.m4a>

Regards, Ben Grubb (the journalist)

~~~
adaml_623
Yep. Audio matches written quote.

Kudos Ben on your quick rebuttal of the misquote claim. And for an article
full of links to all the companies and technologies you're writing about.

------
jtchang
Is e-mail that freaking broken for everyone?

I must seriously not have the same problems. With gmail spam filters and
priority inbox the last thing I need is to visualize my e-mails in a twitter
like stream.

I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails
me something akin to a personal letter.

~~~
BillPosters
Nope. Email not broken for me.

I like it how it is because filters and sensible organising of inboxes is not
hard.

Not interested in email streams at all. I'd prefer to keep streams for the
kind of information that doesn't require action or response frequently per
item. Emails often require action or attention, and it's far better they exist
as subject line items in a date-ordered list for easy retrieval, sorting and
archiving all at once.

~~~
mdpye
But I'd like to take my stream like conversations back to a simple, open,
distributed (in the sense of server control) protocol like SMTP and away from
Facebook Messenger (for example).

It's just a bit of message passing, why should email NOT also handle multiple
participants and almost-real-time conversations well?

Twitter is a different beast, it's a public stream, but what does FB messenger
offer over email, other than an improved user experience? (for some value of
improved...)

------
cellularmitosis
_standard gripe about technologies being declared "dead" merely because they
are no longer growing, rather than because they are suffering from a
vanishingly tiny user-base_

~~~
Groxx
'Dead' doesn't exist in the article, it's a (pointless) bit of editorializing
by the submitter.

The article revolves around email having _stagnated_ , which pretty nicely
fits the "no longer growing" part.

------
rokhayakebe
The attachment feature alone is a something I would pay for; I deeply miss
Xoopit an we'll-organize-your-attachments plugin which gave my inbox a life. I
also like how you can view message and reply without having to go to a new
page. The only problem I see is it's taking me away from my comfort zone
(gmail).

------
Tawheed
We've been thinking hard about innovating email. Interestingly, I don't think
reading the emails is where the real problems are, its in composing the
emails.

------
SkyMarshal
What I'd really like to see is a P2P, encrypted, bittorrent-based mail system,
basically something that works similar to bitcoin, but used for sending
encrypted mail instead.

No central servers, just a single blockchain recording all encrypted messages
on the network and shared over a bittorrent network, and an easy-to-use client
that doesn't make normal people think too hard.

Encrypt a message with your recipient's public key, submit it to the network,
it's accepted into the blockchain, and they decrypt it on the other end with
their private key when the msg propagates to their client. Private (at least
until computing power catches up with the encryption algorithm), decentralized
email without ads, popups, etc.

Give it a nice Apple-ish/fluent.io-ish/sparrow-ish interface, transparent
encrypting and decrypting, and some way of optionally associating email
addresses with public keys so normal users don't have deal with intimidating
hashes (optional only though, still want the ability to send directly to more
anonymous public keys).

While you'd still need some method of preventing block chain forking, you
wouldn't have to worry as much about double spending and transaction
verification since you don't care whether someone sends the same message
multiple times to different recipients (as you do with bitcoin).

One of the biggest problems would be dealing with exponentially increasing
blockchain size. Bitcoin already has this problem and its transactions consist
only of relatively terse amounts of data. With full emails (and attachments?)
you'd have to implement a method of cropping and perhaps archiving the
blockchain, or otherwise solving that problem, or it will quickly become
unweildy and destroy the user experience (esp for people with slow
connections).

Perhaps clients store the blockchain a certain number of blocks back, and then
beyond that they only store their own sent and received messages? Not sure...

The genius of bitcoin is that it is a solution to a difficult algorithmic
problem in distributed systems [1] which can be repurposed for other
implementations. It is already being repurposed for a distributed DNS [2] and
distributed voting systems for elections [3], why not a distributed encrypted
email system as well?

Just throwing this out there without really thinking it through thoroughly
atm... Thoughts? Feasible? Probably the biggest problem is knowing that one
day all your emails would essentially become public domain when hardware
catches up...

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origin)

2\. <http://dot-bit.org/>

3\. ddg-fu failing me atm, will add this later.

~~~
nikcub
You would lose interop with existing email infrastructure. the problem is that
hosted email brings everything back to being too centralized (for eg. most of
the email I send doesn't leave the google servers). Take a product that
implements its own smtp server, nice PGP integration and a nice interface over
it like the one in OP. users may be more likely to want something like that (I
know I do - I can't wait to switch away from Gmail) rather than an entirely
re-invented messaging system.

~~~
SkyMarshal
>You would lose interop with existing email infrastructure.

Yeah, when I mentioned the ability to associate email addresses with public
keys, I wasn't very clear. I did't mean regular email addresses, but was
actually thinking of bitmail-only email addresses. Perhaps ones based on
Namecoin .bit domains.

But I wasn't suggesting interop with existing email infrastructure, this would
be completely separate. In fact, the idea would be to disrupt and supplant the
regular email we all know and love, at least for some use cases where privacy
is paramount.

Everyone would have their bitmail client which they could use to send
encrypted email, as well as their regular Gmail addresses and whatnot. Most
people have multiple emails anyway, this would just be one more.

One nice thing about bitcoin, which would carry over to bitmail, is that
despite the core technology (the official client) being completely outside and
orthogonal to the current financial system, it's very easy to use for its
fundamental purpose. Sending and receiving bitcoins is just simple. I envision
the core bitmail client would work similarly and be similarly simple. No need
for interop as long as there are specific optimal use cases for it (say, Arabs
and others coordinating against oppressive regimes, stuff like that).

------
tga
My new take on email: leave it alone and go fix something that's actually
broken.

I'll take an open source clone of Gmail, thank you very much, especially as
they continue messing with the interface for the sake of it and with the
privacy policy for kicks.

While we're at it, I'll also take an implementation of conversations in
ThunderBird, to make it more like Sparrow, which is quite nice on the desktop.

------
johnx123-up
Ah, title got changed from "Ex-Google Wave engineers new take on Email (email
is not dead yet)" to "Aussies' fix for 'stagnated' email"

------
twakefield
The best thing Gmail has going for it are the shortcuts. They're the best
feature for ripping through an email backlog. I hope anybody working on an
email client includes shortcuts for everything. Once you get used to them,
it's painful touching your mouse.

~~~
nash
I take it you never used mutt?

That is how you rip through thousands of emails in insanely short times. Much
MUCH faster then gmail.

~~~
dasil003
Marginally faster. There's only so fast you can make email because you still
need to comprehend it. And BTW, comprehension + shortcuts is the killer
feature of Gmail. Having a nice GUI facilitates comprehension which allows you
to act faster. There are many reasons why an individual might prefer mutt, but
"Much MUCH faster than gmail" is overstating the case quite a bit.

------
meiji
Is it my imagination or is this a lot like the vision for Mozilla Raindrop. I
was quite disappointed that they started talking about it and then stopped
work on it almost at the same time. The ability to pump all of your messaging
into a single client and have it prioritise what was important seemed a no-
brainer to me.

I'd love to have rss/tweets/fb/g+ updates alongside emails for people I care
about rather than maintaining increasingly complex methods of keeping up to
date with each in different apps

------
antonyh
To me, this looks like webmail to read webmail. Pretty though. I doubt I'll
use it, as it's another entity to trust with my privacy. If it was a
replacement for Gmail entirely I'd consider it.

I'm still searching for a decent desktop email client, something that looks
like this and works on both Windows 7 and Mac OSX. It's a shame that this is a
web app, it doesn't solve any problem that I have.

------
marknadal
Slick interface and the instant search makes me want to use the product.

But I like and trust email because it is stagnate. How is this different than
Buzz (dead) or my other 'streams' like G+/Facebook/Twitter? I don't want my
email to be a stream, because if I miss one, that could be devastating. I
don't want email to evolve, because it is the only thing I can trust that
won't become realtime.

------
retrogradeorbit
If the mail is still hosted at google, hosted in the USA with all the
government snooping and extreme paranoia and everyone is out to get us
attitude, with the NSA, CIA and whatever other corporate/government crime
syndicate reading it, then it fails to fix the biggest flaw in gmail. And that
is the lack of privacy.

------
firefoxman1
Looking at these comments it seems I am the only one blown away by this. It's
amazing! Email for the social network generation. We've become accustomed to
feeds, and for a good reason: it's efficient.

The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more
is such a great time-saving feature.

~~~
aymeric
You are not the only one blown away by this. This story is on the first spot
of HN.

Great UI, I love the attention they paid to some details.

------
chrislloyd
Don't use the Konami code in the app if you want to get anything done this
evening! Incredibly slick UI.

------
iamleppert
What an over-engineered, proprietary interface-ey mess. But at least people
are still plugging away.

~~~
firefoxman1
Anyone ever use Opera mail? _Perfect_ interface and features. I guess it's
just overlooked because, you know, it's Opera :(

~~~
copper
If I remember correctly, I (reluctantly) had to switch to t-bird back in the
day because it didn't do STARTTLS+IMAP. It was perfect, otherwise. I'm yet to
see a faster way to search through mail.

------
bobowzki
"Email has "stagnated" and three Australians who quit Google say they have
built a product that will change the way we interact with email and allow us
to get through our bulging inboxes "20 per cent faster"."

Google Wave anyone?

------
mirsadm
It is a nice idea but to me it seems more suitable as an app for
tablet/smartphone then a replacement for GMail. I wonder if they're just
aiming to get bought out by Google.

------
mbesto
E-mail is stagnated not because of technologic restrictions. Beautiful UI
though!

This is a people problem, not a technology one. Sorry, just don't see it
'fixing' a problem.

------
ghayes
It reminds me of a similar service, ZeroMail [1] (also from Australia). The UI
for Fluent is intuitive, and a nice break from Gmail (esp. with Gmail's new
look).

Given the influx of e-mails I get a day from listservs, friends, business
contacts, customers and random services (Groupon et al.), I see this already
busy interface getting cluttered very fast. That said, I only tried the demo
and would be interested to see what it looks like on my actual inbox with real
people.

[1] <http://zeromail.com/>

~~~
jacalata
Funny, the bit in the article where they mentioned zeromail and talked to the
zeromail founders also reminded me of zeromail.

------
kumarm
Great to see that someone is still innovating on EMail. GMail was last major
+ve change that happened to EMail and its been too long.

------
mhansen
Very smooth interface, from what I can see. FYI on demo.fluent.io I'm getting
HTTP 400 error trying to connect to the websocket.

------
badboy
Wow, the interface is really nice. But I don't think it would work for my
daily mail use. I'm too familiar with my mutt setup.

------
firefoxman1
Mozilla Raindrop aimed to reinvent email too. I was so excited for it to
launch, but they discontinued it.

------
lurchpop
The only thing I feel is broken about [web-based] email right now is that it
can so easily be snooped on.

~~~
eru
By the email provider or by third parties? https fixes the first part. You
can't do much about the second in web-based email.

------
bitwize
Soooo, the solution to stagnating email... is to make it look like Facebook.

Not what I'd call "fair dinkum", but...

------
sendos
Great interface! A big improvement over Gmail and anything else out there that
I'm aware of.

------
michaelneale
aside: how/why did the title change from the original that I posted? (I gave a
title, but it seems to have forgotten that and reverted to the article?)

~~~
underwater
Editors can (and do) change the title to avoid editorializing:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>.

~~~
michaelneale
Thanks - that explains it. Although I object to just using the headline of the
page (as I think the ex-wave is more relevant than the 'aussies' bit - but I
guess there is novelty for the rest of the world).

------
trentmb
At least they left the vowels in the name.

~~~
__jochen__
Over beers, "flnt" seemed good... but sanity prevailed.

------
prtamil
yeah pretty much bored after seeing gmail interface. some innovation required.
its good.

------
johnx123-up
Technology stack, please? Scala?

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
I'm guessing Java.

~~~
jdefarge
Java, Guice, jQuery, and JAX-RS, at least. Dhanji has been deeply involved on
those technologies for a long time.

------
pghimire
With Gmail's "new" interface, I am finding it more and more cumbersome to
navigate around. I practically run my business through Gmail - so it's great
to see another stab at this interface to make things more meaningful and
practical. Goodluck with Fluent.

