

Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released on the Mac App Store - lassejansen
http://www.uniboxapp.com

======
pavlov
Looks quite nice, but I'm not going to try it without a free trial.

Changing email clients is a major chore, and I suspect that there's a good
chance I might return to my boring old mail client after the initial delight
of the new client wears off... With those odds, paying $10 for software that I
probably won't end up using is not appealing.

Also, I feel that the word "beautiful" should be banished from app marketing
copy. There are many things in this world that are beautiful, but I hope my
threshold for beauty never gets so low that a grid view of email attachments
would qualify -- that sounds like a state of mental disorder, experiencing
Stendhal syndrome when faced with a GUI.

~~~
akrymski
I've been wondering this for a while - is there a viable business model for
email clients? Charging a small one-off fee isn't sustainable really. At the
same time charging a subscription (like SaaS) is unheard of for email clients.
Email services on the other hand - a different matter. But even with Google
Apps - $50 a year for an email service is really cheap, compared to any other
SaaS out there. Wonder why that is, when email is so crucial to every company?

~~~
MetaCosm
If you consider playing the consumer lottery and hoping you get purchased a
viable strategy, then sure!

------
drcongo
Hacker News comments are incredibly depressing sometimes. This costs less than
I spend on lunch most days, and looks like a lot of love and attention has
gone into creating it. So first off, congratulations on shipping it. Secondly,
I've just bought it – I'll take it for a spin and let you know how I get on.

~~~
bsenftner
it actually costs so much more, because of how critical email, and past stored
emails are to any professional's life. Can I transparently try it out, leaving
me current email client in place? If not, that's too much risk right there,
risk of loosing access to past emails is quite the cost.

~~~
drcongo
Are you still using POP?

------
bbx
Is email still people-centric? Looking at the 25 latest messages of my inbox,
only 8 are from _real_ persons. The rest comprises 5 newsletters and 12
notifications.

Close friends I contact via SMS mostly, and other friends I contact maybe
twice every 6 months.

Maybe my email usage is unusual, I don't know. Still, Unibox's market is a
niche. Good luck to them though. It's always interesting to see new approaches
towards a medium as old as email.

~~~
k-mcgrady
What do you for business? My use for email is communicating with clients (all
real people :).

~~~
Aloha
if I look at my raw mailstream his case might be correct, I aggressively use
filtering so most of what makes it to my inbox is actually mail.

------
jsdalton
I love it in principle. I actually dove in and purchased it since I've wanted
for so long an email client built around people.

I have a few criticism after actually using it (admittedly for only a few
minutes here):

* The lack of an "Inbox" is disconcerting. It actually really is important to me to just see a list of emails in my inbox, most recent on top, with unread messages marked as such.

* People centric is great, but conversation centric is equally important. Apple Mail and Gmail get high marks on organizing emails by conversation thread, but both I found lacking in their organization by person. This app has the opposite problem: It's great for viewing emails by person, but that's like the ONLY feature. I really strongly dislike how it munges together different conversation threads under a person, which at the same time _excludes_ other emails from other people that were part of that thread.

Maybe they'll add these features later but for now I'll probably slink back to
Apple Mail and maybe keep an eye on it.

YMMV

~~~
rkuerzinger
> I really strongly dislike how it munges together different conversation
> threads under a person, which at the same time excludes other emails from
> other people that were part of that thread.

That's what the thread view is for. Simply click the small icon next to a
message's subject (the one with the number of emails in a thread) and you'll
all of the referenced messages.

~~~
jsdalton
Thanks that's actually a helpful tip.

It doesn't _quite_ solve the whole problem for me, which is that:

* I like to scan conversation threads (of all conversations I'm having presently, not just those involving a single person) -- it's one of the primary ways I look at my mail.

* I find having all of the messages munged together from different conversations I'm involved in with a person to be disconcerting ESPECIALLY since those messages lack the context from other people involved in the context. It's visual cacophony to me. Contrast this with Apple Mail VIPs: When I click on a VIP, I see all of the _conversations_ I'm involved in with that person, not the individual _messages_.

That's just me and my brain. I could of course just be an anomaly.

------
Touche
Wow, the autodetect is pretty amazing. I'm using Fastmail with my own domain
but it correctly knew which servers to use. I always thought that email
clients just look at the domain and if it's gmail.com, yahoo.com, it uses
those settings, but it sounds like this is checking MX records? Any insight
into how it's able to do this (never seen another client be able to)?

~~~
mrud
Mozilla describes a canonical way to detect settings [1]:

1) Use the global ISPDB, e.g.
[https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/$DOMAIN](https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/$DOMAIN),
e.g
[https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/gmail.com](https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/gmail.com)
and extract the information

2) Try to use the provider specific db
[http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddr...](http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddress=email@example.com)

3) Fallback to [http://example.com/.well-
known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.x...](http://example.com/.well-
known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.xml)

It also utilizes MX records and not only the domain.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration?redirectlocale=en-
US&redirectslug=Thunderbird%2FAutoconfiguration)

------
drcongo
First impressions are very good. It's extremely smooth and responsive, the
experience when replying to an email is excellent, and it feels an awful lot
lighter than Mail. The people paradigm in the sidebar didn't take a lot of
getting used to though it'll take a fair bit more use before I can decide
whether I prefer it. At the moment it feels to me like there's another sidebar
missing, one that would take me directly into conversations.

Only drawbacks I've found so far: search seems to make it go a bit sluggish
and it's not that easy to actually find what you're after. I seem to have sent
it into some kind of spin by hitting the sync button which brought up this
error:

An error occured while syncing account [redacted] (2001):

Could not parse command

Overall though, I'm liking it and I'll give it a go as my primary email client
for a while to see if it can replace Mail for me.

~~~
drcongo
Oh, and I can't work out how to star/flag a message.

------
john2x
I've been looking for a replacement for Sparrow ever since they got acquired.
All of the ones I've tried were very "choppy" compared to how smooth Sparrow
is. I hope they offer a demo so I can try it out.

~~~
kmfrk
If the creators are reading this, maybe they could meet you half-way and do a
demo video of the app in action.

~~~
jagtesh
That would be pretty awesome. Nearly as good as a trial.

------
akrymski
Full disclosure: I'm at a YC startup working on a people-centric email service
at Post.fm

Great to finally see some people adopting a similar approach to us, however
the real trick is figuring out the balance between threads and people. Simply
grouping emails by people doesn't work for most professionals who often have
threads with multiple people. This is one problem that's taken us years to
solve - and only now we finally have an algo that gets the right balance I
believe.

Interesting fact - Post.fm used to be called unipost.com, so unibox is a very
interesting name :)

------
skore
I will never understand the persistent fetish to make E-Mail more like Instant
Messaging. Sure, if you only send emails that are a couple of sentences this
might make sense. But that's not what people use email for. That's what they
use one of the bazillion IM services for. And the IM GUI vocabulary breaks
down very quickly for real world email use.

The abstract root of the problem with "let's reinvent email clients" to me is
this: There are things that I want to do in email and things I do not want to
do in email. The "attachments reinvented" (really?) is such an example: Sure,
you could show all the attachments for one person in one place. But when would
I use that? In most cases what I want to do is move data out of email and get
them where they are useful. Gluing them closer to the emails solves no problem
for me.

I get that this is all social and everything, so as somebody who mostly uses
email for work, I'm not the target audience. But either you mostly work stuff
with emails (then this fails on a number of fronts), or you do mostly
social... no wait, you don't do mostly social with emails. That's the problem.
And that's why most email clients are not very satisfying for one particular
use - because serving multiple uses at the same time simply is a dirty
business.

Sorry to fall into the typical HN snark here, but that's how I feel: It does
look nice, but so could a thunderbird theme.

Footnotes:

\- "Sent with Unibox", really?

\- No overview window (at least none shown - do I have to click through the
people sidebar to find a recent email if I'm not sure what I'm searching for?)

\- mentioning "Exchange" \- be very careful here, saying that you support
Exchange sets a very specific set of expectations that I'm pretty sure you
cannot meet. In any case, you're probably inviting in customers that you don't
want and it could cost you a lot of time and money to deal with them.

~~~
fusiongyro
> Sure, you could show all the attachments for one person in one place. But
> when would I use that?

People often remind me that they sent me some file a few weeks ago. This
happens to me pretty frequently, a few times a month. Right now that turns
into a spelunking session (although mu4e helps a lot) but if I could just see
all the attachments from that person in reverse chronological order it would
make it much easier for me to find things.

For what it's worth, features like this would be hugely helpful to me in my
work.

~~~
lassejansen
Unibox has this:
[http://www.uniboxapp.com/faq/attachments/list](http://www.uniboxapp.com/faq/attachments/list)

~~~
fusiongyro
Yeah... that's why we brought it up...

------
Touche
Nice to see email clients who are supporting IMAP again and not just Gmail.

------
kmfrk
Love this concept of niche email clients:

1\. Unibox based around contacts

2\. Mail Pilot based around to-do lists

~~~
akrymski
3\. ZenDesk based around customer support 4\. Close.io based around sales
leads

Indeed it seems like the one-size-fits-all email client of today won't be
around for long.

------
songgao
Nice job! Although a lot of my emails are not people-centric, but
topic/project/event-centric. Unifying them into categories by people would
make it harder for me to keep track of the content.

Would be nice if topic-centric could be added.

------
bhouston
There sure are a lot of custom mail apps, is the paying market for mail apps
really that large? I just use Gmail in the desktop browser and on android and
it seems sufficient.

~~~
czottmann
Not everyone is using Gmail.

------
pkrefta
I wonder how multi-person conversations are handled - but I cannot try it. Mac
App Store seriously needs demo versions support.

~~~
dotmanish
or you can e-mail them to request screenshots of this feature.

------
jasiek
Great, so what guarantee do I have that this app doesn't end up like Sparrow?

~~~
kmfrk
You'll just have to live your life on the edge like that.

------
jagtesh
I've been ripped off before with subpar HTML5 apps wrapped in a native app. If
that's not you, I'm willing to bite the bullet and pay $10 bucks.

~~~
lassejansen
Unibox is a fully native OSX app, webviews are only used for rendering the
HTML email content.

~~~
jagtesh
Thanks for the update. I'll consider giving it a shot.

