
Consider: Email 2.0 - pcr910303
https://www.consider.co/
======
normalnorm
Thanks, but I'll stay with Email 1.0 for as long as I can. It is one of the
last remaining corners of the internet that is not infested with all the
human-hostile behaviors you call "features".

Centralized walled garden, bound to fail, or worse, acquired by some super-
evil corp at any moment ("our wonderful journey"), packed with emojis, real-
time information on who is looking at what worse than the Stasi and loss of
control of your timeline is what EVERYONE ELSE ALREADY PEDDLES. These things
are part of the problem, not part of the solution. For fuck's sake, leave
email alone.

~~~
mvanbaak
As long as one does not go with gmail. Which is, sadly, what most people think
IS email :(

~~~
cloudwalking
I'm quite happy with Gmail... It doesn't have any of the negatives listed
above.

~~~
dependenttypes
Sure, it was not acquired by some super-evil corp but it was created and owned
by one instead. That seems even worse (especially when considering that google
was not evil in its early days, or at it was not widely known).

It is also willing to lock you out of your account and keep begging for your
phone number (even if you haven't entered it previously) in order to unlock
it.

------
Etheryte
Some of the features here are honestly anti-features.

Pinned messages — the last thing I want is someone else choosing how to manage
my inbox and what ends up where.

"Presence" aka more user tracking, now also in your inbox. Who in their right
mind would want this, never mind paying for it?

There's also no mention of how all the rest of the concepts interface with
users who don't buy into the system. Are there partial updates, are people
without a subscription just cut out of comments etc?

There are many companies touting email 2.0 but I deeply doubt this is it.

------
einpoklum
Email 2.0:

* Centrally controlled by a single company.

* Closed protocols (so it seems - didn't see evidence to the contrary).

* Encourages you to "Upgrade your conversations" with emojis.

I'm definitely willing to pay! ... for this not to be anywhere near me.

~~~
gnu8
Yet everyone is so eager to abandon IRC for Slack and that type of garbage.
What is really the difference here?

~~~
erikpukinskis
There's still no quick and easy way to set up an IRC server for a company.

There are plenty of ways to easily set up email.

~~~
okasaki
apt-get install ircd-hybrid?

------
matt2000
This seems like a cool idea, but from reading the info on the page I don't
quite understand exactly what it is. Is it a mail client? I think it is? If it
is an email client, does it have mobile apps? Or do I keep using my gmail app
as is?

Sorry if I'm missing the obvious, but those were my first set of questions
after reading the site.

~~~
usaphp
> If it is an email client, does it have mobile apps?

It says on the website:

Consider is built for Web, Mac, iOS, and Android.

~~~
ken
So is it an email (SMTP/IMAP/POP) client or not?

------
rakoo
This looks similar to Topicbox
([https://www.topicbox.com/](https://www.topicbox.com/)) that Fastmail is
building.

Overall I think the current paradigm of mail clients is not the correct one: a
MUA today is still a glorified view of individual emails, as if it was "just"
a maildir viewer. I would rather have a HN- or Reddit-like view, where focus
is put on the conversation rather than on the people. This will be more useful
than focusing on folders (What's the use of a "Sent" folder ?)

------
lazzlazzlazz
What makes email so versatile with little rent-seeking is that it is a
decentralized protocol. Companies that want to provide services involving
email cannot do so by owning all your contacts or data (like YouTube, Twitter,
etc.) — they must offer competitive services. And all because you can exit
easily.

More things need to have this ease of exiting with all of the data
(cryptographically guaranteed): banks and financial services, social networks,
content distribution systems, etc.

------
vikingcaffiene
Every single one of these tools only connect to Gmail. It's kind of a bummer.

~~~
Alex3917
Gmail has 2.0 Billion users right now. Anything that's successful is going to
build an Outlook integration. The reason they aren't launching with Outlook
integrations is because it's hard to launch as an enterprise product without
any validation for the core value prop; otherwise you'd be spending years
building permission management features without knowing whether the actual
core product is even useful in the first place.

~~~
eikenberry
I'd imagine the OP wasn't expressing frustration about not having Outlook
integration along with Gmail integration. But instead that it doesn't work
with the email protocol, thus working with any standards compliant servers.

~~~
Alex3917
> But instead that it doesn't work with the email protocol, thus working with
> any standards compliant servers.

That isn't really a thing though. The email protocols cover the format of the
message and how it's transmitted, there isn't any standard for how servers are
implemented that would allow one to develop email software that automatically
works with any server. Otherwise Nylas wouldn't be a thing.

~~~
cyphar
That is simply not true. For Client-Server communication there is IMAP (for
management of your mailbox) and SMTP (for sending emails) which is also used
for Server-Server communication.

The fact that clients such as Thunderbird (or mutt) exist and work with
basically all email hosts is a testament to this fact.

------
crispyporkbites
Is there any technical detail on how these features are implemented?

I would like to support improved email but at least some of this has to be
implemented at the protocol level, otherwise it’s just another walled garden
that will wither and die out in a few years.

~~~
kfoley
> otherwise it’s just another walled garden that will wither and die out in a
> few years

Or worse it's another walled garden that doesn't die out in a few years. Not
because what it offers in trade for locking you in is worth it, but because
the inertia it creates makes sticking with it seem more appealing than
migrating to something that could be even worse.

------
ksec
Basecamp are also working on a new Web based Email. We went from little to no
competition in the space to having two launches within same time frame?

I guess this is a sign that people are generally not happy with Gmail?

~~~
rolleiflex
This situation isn’t new, we’ve been watching this competition grow from an
adjacent field for the past year or so. While not directly comparable (nor
competing with) this, the way we solve the email problem don’t require you to
use Gmail, nor giving away your privacy, since we do on-premises.
([https://aether.app](https://aether.app))

------
danShumway
Hard pass.

They say they're trying to save emails because emails are a unique form of
communication that Slack doesn't address. But it doesn't feel like they're
actually thinking about email as a platform, they're just blindly stapling
features to it. It's not clear how those features interact with existing email
features (do inline conversations work with HTML/CSS styling).

And the features don't seem to have much to do with the parts of email they
praised. They spend a paragraph talking about how they love email because it
doesn't have notifications, because it has subject lines, and because it's an
open platform everyone can use. And then they spend a long time talking about
how they're going to add a bunch of chat and forum/wiki crap, on a closed
platform that not everybody can use. What does any of that crap have to do
with asynchronous, thoughtful communication?

 _If_ (and that's a really big if) there's an email 2.0, it's probably going
to be people settling on Matrix or building something new on top of
ActivityPub. I mean, what are the real problems with email? Spam, over-
complicated protocols, bad encryption flows, the difficulty of self-hosting
(largely because of spam), bad message-signing flows and verification of
contents, wildly outdated clients which make it difficult to use modern CSS.

But congrats, I can add emoji reactions now. Which is apparently an acceptable
tradeoff for giving up the ability to communicate with anyone on Gmail.

I don't want to be _too_ negative, but I'm kind of irritated that this made
the front page at all, and I suspect the reason is likely purely because it
mentions email in the title. My uncharitable analysis is that there's nothing
worthwhile to see here. It's just another VC spending a bunch of other
people's money to desperately try and solve a problem that doesn't exist by
throwing engineers at a web app.

------
dreamcompiler
I know I'm not the target audience but I'm at the point where if the most
salient element on a startup's website is a button that says "Get Started" or
"Request Access" I hit the back button.

This fluffy nonsense is really starting to feel lame.

~~~
cercatrova
What should it say instead?

~~~
dreamcompiler
I wish I knew. Sales and marketing are way outside my skill set. Fundamentally
I just want to be convinced the product is "better" before I agree to jump
through the hoops of giving up yet more of my personal information to a
company that's going to spam me until it dies. Make me want your product so
much I have to _seek out_ the "Get Started" button.

I know that's not how VC metrics work. They want maximum engagement in minimum
time. But IMO these kind of "engagements" are hollow and customer-hostile.

~~~
cercatrova
Sites that don't have prominent calls to action are basically dead in terms of
usage and engagement. If you made such a site, you'd just be screwing yourself
over because no one is using your product.

------
mushufasa
i liked the font on the landing page. turns out it's a free open source font
from an award winning designer! [https://www.dafontfree.io/averta-
font/](https://www.dafontfree.io/averta-font/)

~~~
jstummbillig
Not open source and also not exactly free (2 of the 48 styles are freely
available). Still, pretty reasonably priced as far as fonts go:
[https://www.fontfabric.com/fonts/averta/](https://www.fontfabric.com/fonts/averta/)

------
baby
Email 2.0 will probably never come, because too many people are already using
emails.

Due to this, fixing email has to be done on the client side.

What are the problems of emails (as a user):

* not encrypted by default

* spam

What I think would make a good email client to combat spam is a plugin for
browsers: generate a random per-domain email every time you sign up for
something. This makes unsubscribing very easy, and this allows you to see when
a service your registered with shared your email with someone else.

Do you need anything else? I'm thinking of at least two other use cases:

* work. But you probably already have a separate work email.

* friends. But your friends are already probably on facebook, or whatsapp, or ... I have zero friends using email to reach out to me these days.

------
monkeydust
Perhaps just me but Google wave had some potential to be 'email 2.0'

------
coverband
Actually, I’d definitely prefer this as a shared knowledge retention and
shared actioning platform compared to Slack. Slack requires your team to adopt
it 100%, commit to using it as the main communication medium so everything has
a written record, and be in IM-mode all the time, and at a pretty steep price.
Most of its downsides go away if you pursue the same goals but build it on top
of the email paradigm instead. I hope Consider will get some adoption and then
some tail wind to influence this type of a change.

------
mushufasa
I don't see email 2.0 being a paid service. Competition to something like
Slack or Microsoft Teams, sure.

~~~
hk__2
> I don't see email 2.0 being a paid service. Competition to something like
> Slack or Microsoft Teams, sure.

Email 1.0 is already a paid service, by definition. The fact that some
companies offer “free” email accounts in exchange for ads doesn’t change
anything to the fact that servers need to be paid for.

------
LordOfWolves
Hey everyone, here’s our new service, but sorry, you can’t actually sign up
and use it. We aren’t actually even sure we have a product yet, just a landing
page for it. Subscribe for updates though...

/s

------
drcongo
Looks remarkably similar to what Front have been doing for several years.
[https://frontapp.com](https://frontapp.com)

~~~
Jarred
I think Front is more for external communication and Consider is more for
internal communication. These are different usecases

------
macmac
2 features I need: 1) robust group email and 2) copy me out - reverse cc
applied to all down thread mails.

~~~
hkt
2) seems a lot like it is a missing client side feature

------
hkt
People will want to use it? It will be fun?

Honestly, doesn't sound like email.

