
Show HN: Outpost – Collaborative Email for Teams - jonathan_PAS
https://www.teamoutpost.com
======
jonathan_PAS
Hi HN!

I’ve been working on Outpost
([https://www.teamoutpost.com](https://www.teamoutpost.com)) for a couple of
years now - it’s a shared inbox tool for teams that manage email addresses
like info@, sales@, or support@. It has collaborative features like
assignments, notes, saved template responses, etc.

We launched it as an MVP in 2018 and started getting great feedback from users
about how to make it better. A couple weeks ago we hit a huge milestone: we
got our companion mobile app approved in the App Store.

I work on the marketing team, and it’s been a really rewarding journey working
with our smaller team of developers to build a tool like this that can compete
with other tools in the market. We’ve spent a lot of time talking to our users
and developing features based on their requests.

Outpost is a web app that syncs directly with Gmail or Office 365 via IMAP,
and connects to other mail providers via forwarding and SMTP. If users don’t
have a mail provider, we also provide free email hosting.

We built the iOS app earlier this year, and are working on the Android version
right now. We weren’t really sure what to expect when submitting the mobile
app to the App Store, especially given some other product’s recent
experiences, but we were able to get approved in about a week. That was a huge
relief, and we’re really excited to keep moving forward.

I’m happy to answer your questions, or you can check it out for free and let
me know what you think of it. Thanks for taking a look!

~~~
forgotmypw17
It looks like a nice product, but I was not able to try it out due to
accessibility issues.

Many of the controls are labeled in such a way that my browser does not see
them as clickable widgets. For example, the three dropdown selectors in the
top left are not hinted. This is because they are built out of <div> elements,
a big accessibility no-no. See here for more details:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA)

Also, in the console I'm seeing one 500 status code from your own API
([https://api.outpost.co/api/v1/super-
admin/check](https://api.outpost.co/api/v1/super-admin/check)) and several
requests to tracker services, something I wouldn't want on a corporate app.

As a no-mouse user, I had to resort to dragging the pointer cursor around with
mousekeys several times just to get past signup. I would not be able to use
your app on a regular basis.

~~~
jonathan_PAS
Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass this on to our web developer and we'll try
to get those items addressed ASAP.

