
We built a SaaS company to make email better - sologgolos
https://gmelius.com/blog/email-collaboration/
======
bpyne
50+ here...

Email has been the major communication vehicle through my career. The work
team I joined a year ago uses Slack. Our employer's official vehicle for
"chat" is Teams. My team's high school interns prefer Discord. Some friends
use FB Messenger. Others use text.

I have no preference. In the end, all of them can send messages point-to-point
or broadcast. You can share documents in all of them. (I haven't tried it in
Discord but I assume you can.) I can communicate and get work done in any
other them.

Just a few observations.

1\. Trying to figure out who communicated where can become challenging.

2\. Better integration with "productivity" apps can make 1 less challenging.
For instance, a co-worker requests a new API by a certain date. If it's done
in Slack, for example, it would help to have it appear in my task list without
my having to add it manually. Likewise, a friend sends a message in FB
messenger about a cookout: having it go to my calendar would be helpful rather
than my remembering a week later which app she sent the message in so I can
put it on the calendar manually.

3\. My employer is notorious for abusing email. We have message threads with
10-20 people and dozens of replies. Often I would love a way to opt out: a
real opt out, not a reply with a request to Reply All minus me. Not having
this feature is a deal breaker for email going forward IMO.

~~~
swalsh
In my opinion the real power of slack is the historical search. I can't tell
you how many times in my career i've asked a coworker to foward me some email
that has critical information in it. On slack, that information is available
to me, even if I joined months after that information was distributed. It
reduces the amount of information that is imprisioned.

~~~
bpyne
That's one of the ways Slack is more chatroom-like. Good point.

Email would be a bit clunkier as someone from the email thread would have to
forward it to you or reply all with you in it. It's an alternative, but not as
slick as Slack.

------
arnvald
Uhm, this whole article is essentially "we built a product on top of Gmail,
look how awesome it is", doesn't really explain why email is better than Slack
or other apps.

EDIT: it seems the title of submission was changed (previously it said that
email is better than Slack)

~~~
Svip
One thing I dislike is people sending one documents over Slack. Slack and
similar are a terrible document storage systems. Here e-mail is definitely
better. But when people get to used to Slack and its ilk, they start to send
documents via the same channel, when it probably should have been by e-mail.

E-mail lets me take my time, IM does not. I am not usually able to look at
documents sent me instantly, I will do so when I have the time. So when
someone sends me a document via Slack, I usually tell them to e-mail it
instead. Or - when it's a repeat offender - I ignore until they inquiry about
whether I've read the document.

~~~
Footkerchief
Slack supports reminders: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/208423427-Set-a-rem...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/208423427-Set-a-reminder)

------
ianamartin
One thing I don't like about this is that having your internal and external
comms in the same channel presents a large risk of some user making a mistake
inside that channel and accidentally sharing internal information externally.

I can't count the number of times I've seen people reply-all when they
shouldn't have (and come very close myself), reply to the wrong chain, forward
sensitive information that was shown way back at the beginning of a long
chain. I remember one incredibly egregious case where my director and manager
had a long, drawn out discussion about terminating one of my coworkers in an
email thread. About how it really needed to be done, but the timing wasn't
ideal because they needed her to wrap up an important client project, but she
was kind of bad at her job, so maybe they should do it now, but there wasn't
anyone to pick the project up so they agreed to wait a month and a half.

Later on their conversation turned to some other things that were relevant to
my work, and the director forwarded the whole chain to me and one other person
on the team to "see the details in this chain."

Of course we brought it to the boss' attention, but the damage was done, and
my coworker and I couldn't un-know what we had read, nor could we say anything
to our coworker.

That was an _incredibly_ uncomfortable and stressful 6 weeks sitting next to
the woman every day who I knew was going to be fired soon and being unable to
say anything.

I've seen people reply-all griping about clients and get walked out of the
building minutes later.

Yes, I realize that the "where was that message? Email or slack (or
whatever)?" is a legit problem that creates some friction. But for my money,
reducing the risk of blunders like that far outweighs the problems it
presents. I really really _want_ isolated channels.

~~~
lancybancy2000
I agree. I would like to keep my work email and regular email separate.

------
dsr_
When a company builds its product to tightly integrate with another company's
product, I always feel like asking:

\- What will you do if the other company decides to change the way it
looks/acts/feels without consulting you?

\- What will you do if the other company decides to take active measures to
stop you hijacking their product?

\- What will you do if the other company decides that you've got some great
ideas and they will implement those features themselves?

It doesn't actually matter what the answers are to those questions, because
they all boil down to the same result for the customer: someday this is going
to stop working, so I had better not rely on it even if it does seem to be
shiny and useful right now.

~~~
AznHisoka
As if they don't have to worry about... this is a Chrome extension you have to
download in the Google Chrome Store.

So if Google doesn't like it, they don't have to obfuscate the Gmail
HTML/design, or send them a cease or desist... they simply can remove it from
the Chrome Store.

------
sergiosgc
They built a SaaS company to make _gmail_ better. I wish people would stop
conflating gmail with email.

Gmail is large but, even so, I don't understand why would a company throw out
a massive potential user base, by limiting itself to gmail.

------
shay_ker
I understand why Slack would want to stay away from an open protocol, since
their business is so tied to building a moat around keeping businesses on
Slack. Everything they do is to make Slack better and stickier for businesses.

A counterpoint, though, is to think about the long game. Since email is an
open protocol, it will likely _never_ go away. There is incredible leverage
around this. Businesses & tools built on email will work for a long, long
time. There is a legitimate business case to be made, today, for building
things on email, and that, in turn, makes email stickier.

Perhaps Slack stays forever, but perhaps not. It's possible that a new
productivity fad comes into play and makes chat apps a thing of the past. If
it's built on an open protocol - and an open protocol that's not restricted to
one workspace - then Slack will likely exist for a long, long time.

------
tomp
Well they could start at making their website better... changing the website
title to flash "(1)" (indicating a fictional unread message) is incredibly
annoying.

~~~
r-w
I’m not seeing that. Are you by any chance on mobile?

~~~
snarf21
I'm in Chrome on Mac and it says "(1) New Message" every half second.

------
t0astbread
I hate to be the guy but this isn't really making email better, is it? This is
just making Gmail better. And if this becomes a wide-spread tool Gmail will
become necessary and that would be everything but beneficial for email.

------
helmsb
I’m one of the few people who actually like and prefer email. Because it is an
open standard there are is a whole ecosystem of tools to help with managing it
as opposed to be locked into a single vendor’s default experience.

The thing I’ve noticed with people who HATE email is they try and treat email
as though it’s an app like Slack and they let themselves be constantly
interrupted and respond to things as they come in.

My system is pretty simple. I have specific times during the day where I check
email. Otherwise it’s closed. When I check, I look to see if it can be
deleted/archived, is it actionable, does it need to be dealt with now or
later. I NEVER respond to emails while triaging. All I’m doing is clearing the
inbox and determine how things should be filtered. I also look for
opportunities to create rules to auto sort a particular type of email.

The email gets put into to my task manager and I respond when I make it to
that task on the list. I may set the priority depending on urgency but my goal
is to treat responding to email like any other work task and not some special
thing that trumps all other work. I think this is where people slip up.
Someone sending me an email does not make them more important than the other
tasks that I may be working on.

------
helb
_> There are so many places to find information (“Was that in an email? Slack?
Trello? Basecamp?)_

How is your tool going to solve that? Looks like adding one more place to me.
Most companies can't/won't move completely to Gmelius (or some other all-in-
one tool).

Granted, i didn't read much further because the fake chat notification
([https://i.vgy.me/QINgMY.gif](https://i.vgy.me/QINgMY.gif)) made me close the
tab.

------
cies
> Email will always remain the King

And "640k is enough for anyone"

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--
quo...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-
go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html)

Not that I promote Slack, or think that email will go away soon.

------
baby_wipe
I work at a big corp and turned off my email for the past 6 months. You do
miss an occasional meeting invite but otherwise it's been great.

~~~
x2f10
What do you mean by "turned off"? Did you turn notifications off? Do you not
open the e-mail client? Do you no longer have a valid e-mail address with big
corp?

------
meddlin
Why not build on top of Outlook? Gmail is great, but to see this idea really
take off I would hope to see Outlook support in the future.

------
raxxorrax
Email will certainly survive Slack at one point, but I am not really a fan of
gmail. I have an address, but just manage it via imap client.

> Transparent or Private Communication

To be honest, this sounds more like a decision about using gmail or not.

Anyone wants to share ICQ numbers? You know, like the cool kids do?

------
r_singh
For the "Compare with Front App" page: I think Front has CRM integrations too.

------
lunchables
Congratulations, that flashing title with UNREAD MESSAGE is new most annoying
thing on the internet. You reinvented the blink tag I hope you're all proud.

------
jayflux
Genuinely curious, why does Slack keep being compared to email, is it not more
comparative with chat services like IRC? To me they solve different problems

~~~
derwiki
IRC was never used by the general population like email (and now Slack). 10
years ago I worked at a company where the dev team used IRC for chat, and the
non-devs didn't use chat because IRC was too daunting.

~~~
pier25
We have Slack at work but only devs use it. Non devs prefer sticking to email
and Whatsapp.

------
humbfool2
Looks similar to [https://kanbanmail.app/](https://kanbanmail.app/)

------
bluedino
1\. People under 30 generally -hate- email, some even refuse to use it

2\. Building a product on top of a Google product, even if it is Gmail?

3\. Stop trying to make email something that it's not. Basecamp, Slack,
Trello, they're successful because they _aren 't_ email. Add-ons to email are
just headaches for everyone

~~~
sethammons
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/271501/us-email-usage-
re...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/271501/us-email-usage-reach-by-
age/)

According to this link (just a quick google search for email usage by age)
shows that young people (<25) are more likely to use email than folks over 45,
coming in at 91% of younger people in the US using email.

Do they -hate- it? Harder to say, but I think that if 9/10 people use it, they
likely don't hate it.

~~~
maire
How valid is this data?

I can never reach my non-technical friends any more by email, I have to use
text messaging or facebook messaging. My more technical family members use
slack.

Sure everyone has an email account, but the less technical seem to not be
using it any more. The excuse they give is that it is filled with spam and
they don't know how to get rid of the spam.

If I absolutely want to reach everyone in a diverse group I use text messaging
even though I hate text messaging.

