
Mail Pilot App - dhruvbhatia
http://www.mailpilot.co/
======
swombat
I've really wanted to like this app, and to try it, but the reviews on the App
Store are absolutely appalling - most complaining that the app is effectively
useless. This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Add to that the fact that I tweeted the MailPilot twitter account many times
about this and never got a single reply, and this is a definite NO PURCHASE.

I really want to find that this app is great, but I'm not willing to ignore a
mountain of evidence just because this is what I want to believe. Caveat
Emptor, Buyer Beware.

Has anyone here actually used MailPilot sufficiently to counter those numerous
negative AppStore reviews?

~~~
zenojevski
> This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Everyone says the $ 20 or so are a steep price, but I paid twice that for
Mailmate[1] and it's worth every drop.

It's probably my most used app after Sublime Text (to which it integrates, by
the way) and It repaid itself after a couple hours of stress-free operation.

Granted, people lament that this app doesn't work well, but my point is that,
as pervasive as mail is, every small bit of improvement in this area may could
end up greatly multiplied. $ 20 may be much for a "useless" piece of software,
but I think it's wrong to start with that as a general assumption for a mail
app.

[1]: Mailmate: [http://freron.com/](http://freron.com/)

~~~
swombat
Mailmate has a trial version that works fine for 30 days. I actually did try
it, though I ended up going for AirMail instead... and then went back to
Mail.app!

I don't mind paying $20 or more for a great email client - I mind paying that
for a shitty email client that fails at even basic stuff like, you know,
receiving emails.

------
joshuakarjala
Hope this one day becomes fast / stable enough that peers start recommending
it.

As part of the original Kickstarter backing - I gave up on this product long
ago because of numerous issues.

------
danieldk
For those who like Mail.app: MailTags has been around for years, and adds
tags/labels, notes, and reminders to Mail.app. One of the nice things about
MailTags is that it stores its information in a header in the e-mail on the
IMAP[1][2] server. So, it does not funnel your mail through a server and the
tags show up on all your Macs.

[http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html](http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html)

I thought it was worthwhile mentioning, since I hadn't seen this plugin until
a few months ago.

[1] This does not work with GMail, since it stores a new copy of the e-mail
with the extra headers and then deletes the old one. GMail recognizes the new
copy as a duplicate and never stores it.

[2] I am not sure if they take any security precautions, since a sender could
add the header as well. Would be fun to try I guess :).

~~~
jwr
I tried to use MailTags, tried really hard. But it never achieved its promise.
First, tagging E-mail was just too much of a hassle, second, there were bugs
and issues and I spent a lot of time with support to try to resolve those, and
third, there just wasn't that much utility, especially given the speed of
Mail.app's search window on SSD drives.

I stopped using MailTags and never looked back, although the remains haunt me
to this day (Spotlight complains about mail header problems).

I would not recommend MailTags, unless you enjoy spending time tagging your
E-mail and have some spare time for support conversations.

~~~
danieldk
I am still on the fence. I like it generally and it's easy to tag quickly with
shortcuts. It's Mail.app that bothers me, because its shortcuts are annoying
(even with GMailinator) and IMO it's slow (even on SSDs).

Now that there is a great mutt version that supports notmuch (mutt-kz) I might
abandon Mail.app. But for now, MailTags keeps it bearable :).

------
tlrobinson
Glad to see they don't feel the need to funnel all your mail through their
servers like Mailbox did.

 _Is it secure & private?

Mail Pilot never stores, processes, or transmits your data through third-party
servers. Your account details, passwords, and personal data are securely
stored on your device. All communication occurs directly between your device
and your email server._

~~~
mongrol
Which they can't prove since it's closed source.

~~~
matthewmacleod
They probably aren't lying. And if they were, it would be trivially possible
to demonstrate that the app doesn't send data to a third-party server in
general use. And it would be discovered pretty quickly.

There is no way—even with open source software—to prove that and app isn't
sending data to a third party. Unless you are going to build all of your
hardware from raw materials, and build your own software by hand, using a
bootstrapped compiler that you wrote yourself. In machine code.

Given the above, it's obvious that there has to be a level of trust involved
at some point in the process. The majority of people using open-source
software aren't building it themselves, and so the trust issue would still be
there if the software _was_ open. Who's to say they wouldn't provide a binary
that shipped your data off, without including that code in the open release?

IOW, your predictable shallow response adds precisely zero value to the
discussion about how to ensure privacy in software.

------
toyg
Still no support for Exchange. Sigh.

I know it's a PITA to work with, but let's face it, the business opportunity
is huge.

* Fancy mail clients for IMAP/POP: hundreds.

* Fancy mail clients for Exchange: zero.

* Every Exchange account out there is a corporate/business user, which means s/he is much easier to monetize (and on a large scale).

Inb4 "Exchange is proprietary-closed-blablabla": Mail.app works fine with it,
so it can be done. Clearly it's just too boring for the cool kids to hack on.

~~~
Justsignedup
most people at my job want to leave ms outlook for Mac and mail.app but alas
no exchange support on their favorite clients.

~~~
chewmieser
AirMail works for exchange. Not perfect by a long shot, but I prefer it over
Outlook for Mac.

------
jwr
I bought both the Mac app and the iOS app immediately, for one simple reason:
this is an effort to attack the "mail problem" that actually shows promise.

We live in a world with broken E-mail [1], and there are very few attempts to
fix it. And it turned out that very few people are willing to pay for better
E-mail. Well, given how much time I spend on E-mail and how useful it can be,
I am one of those people willing to pay.

I bought the apps even though the iOS one couldn't even work with my (Linux-
based, dovecot) IMAP server. I don't mind, I want these guys to take the money
and develop the apps.

Here's hoping they won't sell the company tomorrow to an evil giant who will
shut the whole operation down.

[1] Just off the top of my head, some broken aspects of today's E-mail: HTML
E-mail, crappy threading, broken quoting, top-posting, problems with
attachments, attachment sizes, mail sorting…

~~~
dingaling
> I bought the apps even though the iOS one couldn't even work with my (Linux-
> based, dovecot) IMAP server.

I have a colleague who analysed the Mail Pilot IMAP conversation and managed
to hand-craft his Dovecot IMAP folders _just right_ so that the app worked
with his VPS. IIRC it was a problem with the app being really picky about IMAP
namespaces.

The same problem meant that the app didn't work with Fastmail, but despite
having been informed of the bug the Mail Pilot team blamed Fastmail and 'non-
compliant IMAP implementations'.

The Fastmail response was a classic: show us where the bug is in our
implementation and we'll fix it in a week. There was no response.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
I think I'll forgo the pleasure of paying for an email client who's makers
believe that in the real world there is such a thing as a 'compliant IMAP
implementation'.

------
kstrauser
Heartbleed did the world a favor: it reminded us that you can't throw
encryption on top of something and call it secure. Mail Oilot devs didn't seem
to learn that. From their support docs at
[https://mailpilot.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1315088-...](https://mailpilot.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1315088-do-
you-support-encrypted-accounts-requiring-an-additional-level-of-password-
authentication-) :

> Currently, Mail Pilot only supports normal password authentication.

> A future update (currently in development) will include support for: CRAM-
> MD5, DIGEST-MD5, Kerberos 4, GSSAPI, NTLM, as well as Secure Remote
> Password.

So while they claim to value security, the app still requires you to send your
password in cleartext. There's no way my IT department would enable cleartext
auth on our mail servers, and I'd be too embarrassed to ask them to.

------
hbbio
It seems a good mail client for the Apple ecosystem.

But it's been around for some time: Why the news now?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Probably (as the title hints at) because they're working on a 'v2' for mobile
devices.

------
eddieroger
I must be using email wrong. This looks a lot like Mailbox, which I couldn't
successfully integrate in to my workflow (making the wait a real bummer). I
normally keep my inbox at zero if possible, and carve out time at the end of
the week to make sure I start Monday clean, and I base my folders around a
modified GTD workflow. Getting an email "twice" (notified on receipt, then
again no reminder) seems like it would add unwanted clutter to my life.

------
filmgirlcw
I backed this on Kickstarter (for $100 no less) and while I really want to
love the apps and the system, I just don't. Not yet anyway. So many or the
ideas are strong and the execution is getting better and better, but as
someone who gets a few hundred inbound messages a day, it's not ther for me.
Not yet.

But I love what they are trying to do and I don't regret supporting the
development of this as a product that gets better moving forward.

------
aflaisler
If you guys are looking for a new experience of email management, with auto-
created folders per contacts / projects available on iOS, Android and a
webapp, have a look at the project me and my mates are working on:
[http://www.mailcloud.com/thanks](http://www.mailcloud.com/thanks)

You can signup for the Beta here:
[http://www.mailcloud.com/](http://www.mailcloud.com/)

~~~
1stop
What a new experience!

I NEVER expected to go to a new startup and have them ask for my email address
then send me an email saying I'm in going to get an account soon!

Amazing, you guys are so unique, not only changing the way email should be
done. But also changing how internet startups should do business.

Who needs an actual product, when you have the PROMISE of a new product.

Genius! 100% Genius.

------
sikhnerd
Unfortunately the fact that it doesn't appear to store any mail locally (and
some appstore reviews back this up) is a non-starter for anyone (including me)
who ever wants to do email on a poor connection.

I've been using Airmail [1] to do essentially everything you can do with
Mailpilot, though with not as clean a UI, with pretty good success.

[1] [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/)

------
pfalke
If you like the reminder functionality but don't want to switch to yet another
mail application on all your devices:
[https://followup.cc](https://followup.cc) is a great service, you can also
try my own (less sophisticated but FOSS) implementation at
[http://www.pfalke.com](http://www.pfalke.com)

------
sorpaas
Why we again treat our mail box as a GTD list? Isn't it more convenient to use
a fully functional GTD task manager such as org mode?

~~~
jffry
Email notifications are universal. Many disparate services all can push out
transactional emails, which are then aggregated in one place.

To replace email, you would need to create something which is as universally
adopted. Good luck!

------
kaivi
Just bought this GTD app for both iOS and Mac, and here are some random
thoughts:

It wouldn't import existing accounts from Keychain. Well, okay.

The app does not sync settings between iOS and Mac, and it appears that it is
using IMAP folders for sorting e-mails. I guess that's what IMAP folders are
intended for.

It would be really nice if one could create rules for sorting incoming
messages. For instance, move all e-mails from "%@hidemyass.com" to folder
"Proxies".

Rich text editor for composing e-mails is primitive. No indents, TAB key does
not work as expected, no blue colored quote blocks.

Can't find a plaintext composing mode.

Multiple file attachments in a chain of e-mails - they all bunch up in the
bottom.

Whenever I send an e-mail, I would like to set a date, by which I anticipate a
response. Guess that is a reasonably obvious function which should be
implemented. Perhaps I missed it.

Say, I have installed the app, but I don't want to deal with garbage older
than a week. Whenever I clean up new e-mails, it loads more messages: weeks or
months old. I have e-mails all the way back to year 2002 in there.

When I set "Remind me" date on iOS, it shows a segmented UIPickerView. A full-
sized calendar would be much more practical.

The iOS client has just stumbled upon a certain chain of 6 e-mails, and it
keeps crashing.

Is it possible to temporary quit & disable the default Mail app on iOS?
Because both my Mac, iPhone and iPad are trying to open >15 connections to my
$2 paid Gmail business mailbox, and all of the devices fail randomly and spam
error messages. This has been most frustrating with the default Mail app, not
to mention this paid alternative.

They've sent their Yacht Club newsletter invitation to an address which I've
added first – it was a shared corporate box.

Searching for e-mails is done on servers at the same time: extremely slow and
frustrating. Now I can only use Mail Pilot alongside Mail.app, which lets
Spotlight index the attachments.

 _Just noticed that they 're building Mail Pilot v2_.

Overall, it would be nicer to have Mail Pilot as an extension to Mail.app, but
instead it tries to replace it. Guys, you can store my passwords and index my
inbox if you need to – just make the experience seamless, so I don't even have
to think about it.

------
mike-cardwell
I am the author of
[https://emailprivacytester.com/](https://emailprivacytester.com/) \- But I
don't have any Apple devices, so I'm unable to test this client. Would
somebody please give it a test and report back here.

------
ansimionescu
If you're on OSX, Airmail is a $2 Sparrow clone and is the absolute best email
client I've seen, with a great/active development team.

[http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/)

------
uncletaco
No exchange support :(. Mail Pilot looks like a great app and would love the
ability to consolidate my emails under one app for mac and iOS. Currently I
use Airmail for mac and Accompli for mobile.

------
jkmcf
IMO, assuming exchange support matters, Airmail on OS X and Boxer on iOS are
the best choices. Airmail has been consistently improving and I have no
serious complaints against it anymore.

------
alexcason
For that price I'd want to test the app for a while first.

~~~
alialkhatib
Agreed. $20 is also kind of steep for an app whose current version only has
2.5 stars in the app store (and 3.0 across all versions). It sounds like it
crashes a lot and is missing some seemingly basic features.

------
shirman
It is strange that the same functionality is not possible to get via chrome
extensions

------
switch007
Looks good, but it does need a trial of some kind. I'd definitely try it out.

------
gdonelli
Does it use lib MailCore?

------
ewinters123
I love the look, great design. How is it different from other mail apps?

------
DasIch
This looks nice and all but they don't seriously expect anyone to be using
this without support for signing and encrypting messages, are they?

~~~
matthewmacleod
The vast majority of people don't sign or encrypt emails, so I don't see why
you'd think that.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
The vast majority of people don't pay for an email client.

A niche client doesn't have an eco system full of plugins and hacks, so it
better be fully featured.

