
Show HN: Gaggle Mail – Simple group email - shutton
http://gaggle.email
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shutton
Hi, I've built this over the last few months and have seen a few people sign
up and be quite happy with it (which is nice!).

I'd love to hear any feedback the HN community has and I'd really appreciate
any tips people have about marketing this site since I've not done much of
that and don't know where to start.

~~~
e12e
I welcome any service that promotes email (over more proprietary solutions, be
that Facebook Pages or some hosted groupware). That said, for a more technical
crowd, your page(s) are a bit light on detail:

1) Do you provide an archive? Can it be public?

And while I usually tell people (based entirely on my intuition rather than
actual business experience) to charge more -- where does the 100 members limit
come from? Certain types of groups, like alumni from a single
subject/course/small business/hobby -- might organically grow past that point.
Should they then migrate away from your service?

In general I wish you the best of luck - but for me (not really a target
audience) -- I'd like to know how this compares to setting up a Mailman-list,
D-lang forum or something along those lines for non-technical users? (Apart
from the obvious, and undeniable value-add of you hosting the actual service).

~~~
shutton
Thanks for the feedback.

There is a searchable archive of all messages which is only available to the
list administrators. Since members of a list aren't required to have any sort
of credentials the message archive isn't available to be but I do intend of
make options in this area.

The limit of 100 members is mostly an attempt, at this time, to only tragedy
small group. I simply didn't want groups of 1000's from the start.

As to how we're different from a MailMan-list etc. Our aim is to make setting
up and managing an email list as simple as it can be. Group email is a very
effective tool for small groups and we want to make it available to as many as
them as possible.

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lentil
This reminds me of Breeze[1] from Basecamp. That service no longer exists, but
it always seemed like a great idea to me.

Your landing page design is really nice, too.

[1] [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3391-launch-basecamp-
breeze-t...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3391-launch-basecamp-breeze-the-
easiest-way-for-small-groups-to-keep-in-touch-via-email)

~~~
fiatjaf
It probably also claimed to be "permanent".

~~~
shutton
I totally get what you mean. It's really hard to prove that you're going to
stick around and people are quite right to be scepicle about tech firms who
seem to close stuff down as soon as the wind changes direction.

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joe5150
To be clear, this is $2/mo or $10/yr _per group_ , right?

~~~
shutton
Yeah, that's right.

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gull
Is there a limit on disk space?

Can I ask how much disk is used (or how you much disk you project will be
used) on average per email group?

I loved the simplicity of the UI and the short explanations.

~~~
shutton
Hi, there's no limit on disk space.

We use Google Cloud Datastore which is quite reasonably priced at $0.18 per GB
per month.

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grouplet
Very nice. It seems identical in functionality to my own side project:
[https://grouplet.cc](https://grouplet.cc), however you have do have a nicer
UI because I'm not the best designer in the world :-)

Grouplet is free, and has quite a number of groups using it. It's so cheap to
run that I didn't feel it was worth charging for until I have an insane number
of emails being sent every month.

Good luck, I hope it works for you!

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ORioN63
Yeah, I recently needed something like this. We settled for google groups, but
it's nice to see alternatives.

~~~
shutton
A few of the groups which have signed up were using Google Groups but got fed
up with it/wanted something simpler. It's heartening that people are prepared
to take a paid alternative over something which is free when it's a better
fit.

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spike021
There used to be another mail service I used in a class at school probably a
decade ago called Gaggle.

This seems like a cool alternative to FB groups/Google groups/etc. though.

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lavingiasa
Those Material buttons look super nice

~~~
shutton
I've really enjoyed using Materialize
([http://materializecss.com](http://materializecss.com)) with this project, I
think those guys have created a really good framework.

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fiatjaf
"permanent"? Nothing is permanent if you have to pay monthly.

~~~
shutton
Fair point but free services get shutdown too.

