

The Mail Pilot Public Beta - alexobenauer
http://www.mailpilot.co/publicbeta.html

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mapleoin
From the about page:

 _Email is in need of a fresh start. No one wakes up in the morning and
thinks, “I can’t wait to check my email!”_

Am I the only person who has no problem managing their email? I'm a software
developer and have 4 email accounts that I check regularly all from the same
Thunderbird email client. I have filters and folders for mailinglists. I have
different accounts for different personas (personal, work, work and open
source/fun). I get hundreds of mails per day, tens a day that I actually need
to react to.

I really don't have the problem of dreading to check my email. I know I'm not
a manager of a startup or a big company, but then most people aren't.

~~~
modarts
That underlies a major issue i'm seeing more of in the tech startup scene:
Coming up with solutions to problems a large majority of users don't face.
Blog after blog proclaiming that "Email is broken", "It's time to rethink
email" etc, etc.

No. Your users don't think that at all. They are happily chugging along,
oblivious to the crises manufactured by neckbeards. Your value proposition
needs to be reframed in terms of what your product can do on it's own merit;
without the need to attempt to deprecate an existing technology/platform.

~~~
ljoshua
These are solutions to problems faced by middle- and upper-management, so
there are real customers out there that have this real problem. The
difficulty, however, is getting this cool, shiny solution into their existing
corporate email workflow.

~~~
46Bit
Exactly. People seem to be designing entirely consumer focused experiences
around a problem that's main pained group and largest collection of cash is
the upper echelons of corporations.

~~~
amirmc
I think when you're at that level you're actually competing with _humans_. If
I'm upper management and have too much incoming mail, I can hire a human to
help me sift/prioritise/ignore as well as all the other things a human can
help me with.

~~~
jvermasheina
Very very very well put! That actually holds true to many B2B sales scenarios
- especially when targeting C levels.

// OT //

Your point connected especially well with me since it rang so many bells with
what I experienced when I was pitching my last startup (now defunct) in the
live music industry.

Music and live music industry is a bit perverted in that it's such a "cool"
scene to be associated with that it has a constant flux of fresh and very much
free workforce available. As in humans.

This eventually created a bit of a conundrum in terms of value creation and
pitching digital solutions to our prospecting customers - the live music
promoters.

How exactly can you create value out of eg. time savings or better workflow
management if the essential resource (workforce) is basically free and
abundant. :)

Needless to say I'm not a huge fan of music startups in general nowadays for
this particular reason since this problem basically permeates the whole
industry through and through.

I have a hard time seeing a B2B / B2B2C service provider extracting a
meaningful business out of music industry SMB's.

But I digress. :)

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jfarmer
I paid $60 to try it out. Not worth it right now. It might, _might_ be worth
it when the desktop app is out.

I wish I didn't fork over the money.

~~~
JoelMarsh
Upvoted. Sorry to hear about your buyer's remorse, but thanks for paying it
and posting your thoughts. Anything more specific? Likes and dislikes?

~~~
jfarmer
The web UI was slow and I didn't realize it was web-only until I bought it.

Can I get a refund?

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kadjar
So.. there's no way to try it without dropping $60?

It looks nice, but I don't even buy operating systems without trying them
first, let alone subscription services.

~~~
tanepiper
This - asking me to commit $60 for a whole year, without even giving me 15 or
30 days to see if it works for me really puts me off.

There seems to be an overconfidence from the developer that they have the
perfect solution to something that isn't really a problem.

~~~
Lewisham
_And_ it's not a one-time payment, they want a subscription payment every
year, which is incredibly obnoxious for a desktop app.

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sirclueless
I appreciate that someone is making an email app for power users. It does a
lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's priority inbox (I
leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done" tasks, and star
items I want to revisit in the distant future). On the other hand, I have
grown so accustomed to Gmail's conversation view that there is no way I can
give it up, even for a really good service, and it doesn't look like Mail
Pilot has this feature.

Gmail's conversation view is in my opinion a nearly insurmountable barrier to
entry for other companies. 1) It's a tough natural language processing task,
which means startups have trouble with it. 2) It requires someone
algorithmically reading all my emails, which means it's such a PR nightmare to
even try it that only Google is willing to weather the storm.

~~~
natrius
_"It does a lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's
priority inbox (I leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done"
tasks, and star items I want to revisit in the distant future)."_

I solved this problem by no longer using my email as a task management tool.
Emails that contain a new task get forwarded to Asana, where tasks are easier
to deal with. This approach is closer to the Unix philosophy of narrowly
scoped tools that can be effectively combined, and it's a philosophy that
hasn't failed me yet.

 _"Gmail's conversation view is ... a tough natural language processing task"_

Is it? How is it more than a different way of presenting threads?

~~~
Derbasti
Technically, it is like threads, but it includes messages from other
directories that belong to the thread, thus showing you the whole coversation
including your answers and archived messages.

Graphically, it shows all the messages in a continuous stream as opposed to
only one message at a time. Since you now see all responses at once, there is
no need for quoting any more, so quotes are collapsed.

I don't use Gmail any more, but conversation view is all but essential for me,
too.

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gm
Sounds like Outlook to me? Ie, being careful of which emails to mark as read
("complete"), setting up reminders for later on individual emails, taking a
message and adding it to a to-do list, etc...

Or what would this offer that Outlook does not (other than not being a MS
product). I'm being serious, not a smart ass. I would love to be able to leave
Outlook...

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pknight
I signed up oblivious to the fact that they were going to present a forced
checkout step midway registration. What a sucky experience. I'm not going to
spend $60 on a product I haven't even seen to a company who's policies I don't
even know (information is very skimpy).

On second thought I realized that letting a startup deal with my email is the
exact opposite of what I want. It already sucks that we have to trust email
providers with our communications, let alone let in another 3rd party that's a
startup. Sticking with Thunderbird. I would like a better email client though.

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rshlo
I really can't understand why there is no trial period, maybe even for 14
days.

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scottru
Does anyone know where we can find actual user reviews of this? I like the
ballsiness of requiring payment just to see the beta, but I don't know what
I'm getting for my $60.

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motoford
I tried to sign up but it kept telling me my password was not good enough,
although I was sure to include the required characters.

~~~
knodi
Yes, I really hate this. I was going to pay the $60 but just because of their
current password rule I decided against it.

~~~
motoford
I get your sarcasm. I missed the gotta pay to try, I thought I was signing up
for a trial or a beta.

My complaint isn't that they have a password rule, it's that my password met
the requirements but they obviously are looking for something other than what
they are rejecting mine on. I suspect it was length, but by then I was tired
of trying to guess.

~~~
knodi
No, I'm serious. The password rule turned me away.

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ew
I'd love to know the reasoning behind the archaic password requirements. As a
rule there's absolutely no way I'm changing my extremely secure password just
for their app.

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dmishe
Horrible JPEG compression <http://www.mailpilot.co/images/img5.jpg>

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modarts
Your "Get Started" call to action should be an anchor/input/button with
corresponding active/hover states.

