
Ask HN: What are your email dreams? - dropmailapp
Hey Hacker News,<p>We’ve spent the past 2 years trying to build our vision for a great cross-platform email app. We are planning to launch in the next few months and are looking for ideas for how we can make email easier.<p>We would really appreciate hearing about any bad experiences you’ve had with email, ideas you have, or what you’re looking for in an email app.<p>Thanks!
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malux85
Support multiple accounts with different providers, but through a simple
unified interface. Do what apple does in their mail app and default the
settings where you can .. e.g. put in the default mailserver details for known
providers.

Support for delay 5 mins then send to stop accidental sends.

 _Easy_ attach pictures or files - 1 or two taps.

If you need to do something CPU intensive (e.g. resize the 10MB image to 500k
- do it in a thread in the background - dont make me wait, free up the UI!)

Let me view attachments inside your app (images, pdf, xls, doc minimum)

Support alerts for important emails (e.g. simple regex or string matching
rules, if you get email that matches rule, then alert like crazy - ring the
phone if you can - until I've acknowledged it)

~~~
dropmailapp
Thank you! Really appreciate your response. Definitely going to go through all
of these and try and make them happen!

~~~
malux85
No probs, let me know when your app is ready, I will buy it :)

~~~
dropmailapp
Glad to hear that! 100% Free :-). And no 3rd party servers involved. Our goal
is really just to improve email as much as we can. In the future we will most
likely offer premiums for things like tracking emails, getting more involved
contact info etc for sustainability but our primary goal doesn't involve
profit.

------
SyneRyder
I am mostly happy with Postbox (commercial Thunderbird fork) and I'm unlikely
to switch, but I will consider a premium cross-platform email client. Things
that come to mind:

* Reliability is crucial. I love Postbox, but version 4 is hanging a lot on El Capitan. Email is the _last_ program I want to have to Force Quit. It has to be rock solid and easy for me to import/export my mail.

* Search is also crucial - I have my entire 20 year email archive (minus spam) on my laptop! Fast search is good, but search also needs to reliable. It's more important that it ultimately finds the email I want. Postbox also has a problem where as soon as I index an email folder, it tells me the folder needs to be reindexed.

* Email for me is all about filters & prioritization. I have hundreds of rules that scan my email before I ever read it and assign a priority to the email. Sometimes I have to manually tweak the priority if the rules were slightly wrong, and the client should memorize that. My inbox should be sorted in priority, as if an assistant has already gone through, got rid of the junk and determined which are most important and the order I should do them in.

* Keyboard shortcuts are a huge win. Having 'a' for archive and 'v' for file (and a pop-up window where I can type & search for the folder to file an email into)... it sounds like a tiny thing, but it was a _huge_ win for my productivity when Postbox copied that from Gmail.

* I don't need calendar integration, I'll use a separate calendar app for that.

* While I don't need support, it would be nice to at least have somewhere to report bugs. Postbox lowered their price & discontinued support, and now I can't find where to report the problems or have a sense of if they'll be fixed. I want the opposite of what Postbox did: increase the price & give a premium experience & powerful, luxury product.

* I still use POP3. I know I'm crazy, but it feels good to not have all my email stored on a server.

Email is mission critical for me. I basically run my entire business through
it. I'm happy to pay for it - in fact, I'm waiting for someone to get serious
and charge $100 for their premium email client with annual upgrades. MS Office
is $100/year, Photoshop is $120/year, and yet email is more important to me
than both of those programs.

~~~
dropmailapp
Thank you for your feedback! I agree with all of your points. Your third point
regarding filters and prioritization has proven extremely helpful to us with
understanding what people want from email rules :-).

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trcollinson
Wait, I'm confused by your post. You've spent 2 years solving this problem.
You still are a few months away. Why are you now suddenly asking what problems
we have that you can solve? Isn't that what you did 2 years ago?

My question for you is, what are you solving? What problems have you
identified? How can you make my life better?

~~~
dropmailapp
Thank you for the response!

Totally get your confusion! To rephrase we spent 2 years building the
technology behind our platform but are still building the app itself. Our
statement of a few months was a bit optimistic and most likely should have
been omitted. We are asking for problems as we want to ensure we haven’t
overlooked any important issues. Our overall goal is just to build a great
email app for everyone, not just us, and this is the best way we know to do
this.

Why build it and why 2 years?!? Before this project we had many previous
issues with email. For example, sometimes important messages would fail to
send, accounts wouldn’t sync, and the experience just sucked overall. Since
then I really wanted to build a email client for myself. Something reliable
that just worked. A few months later Mailbox for iOS was released and
demonstrated that people still had an interest in email despite the
introduction of instant messaging etc. We absolutely loved the simplicity and
beauty Mailbox brought to mobile email and thought it would be really nice to
have something of this capacity for desktop especially given at the time there
were barely any decent desktop email apps. So, we set out to build it. Given I
was the only developer and had no prior experience with the email
infrastructure it took a long time (2 years) to gain the proper knowledge and
build the architecture behind it.

What have we solved? From our personal experiences we learned that adding more
and more features, while nice, doesn’t really help with the core issue we have
identified. People gets lots of email. With this comes the realization that
there really isn’t much that can be done about this. Sure we could add some
nice filters etc but the problem still remains. So while we do have a few
extra features here and there our main focus has been on simplicity and
reliability to cut-out all the time wasted from messages not sending etc so
you can just focus on managing your email.

Summary So in summary we are building the email app we always wanted and are
reaching out for ideas and experiences to make it one that not only we like
but many others can like as well.

I really hope this made sense and answered your questions! If I failed to do
so please let me know and I will do my best to answer.

\- Marcus

~~~
trcollinson
So in essence you have solved the problem of a mail client not properly
notifying the user when mail does not send? I use Gmail, Mail, and Outlook.
All of these notify me nearly instantaneously when a message does not send. On
the odd occasion that my mail doesn't sync, I know almost immediately. Really,
from my experience, email works quite well. As you say, you are reducing the
time wasted by emails not sending and accounts not syncing so that time can be
spent managing your email. That's fine, but we already have that. You say
there is nothing you can do about the amount of mail people get.
Unfortunately, that is the problem in the space I think. Mail clients and
servers are very good at sending and receiving mail. But making the mail
relevant, now that's a problem.

~~~
dropmailapp
I see what you mean. For the time being I guess we are just trying to make a
nice mail app. Hopefully in the long run we can differentiate ourselves more
from the masses by determining as you said ways to show mail relevancy. We
have a basic form of this at the moment in forms of the ability to filter by
(Newsletters, Social, Personal, Service) but I hope we can expand it to be
more useful in the future. Thanks for taking your time to get back to us, it
really helps and means a lot :-)

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AznHisoka
I have no problems with email. My problem lies with the types of email I get
(recruiters, etc) only. Gmail is perfect

~~~
dropmailapp
Thanks for the response! I see what you mean, the best we could do for your
situation is filter out recruiters I suppose.

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kestrelhawk
I used to work for a company that provided support for Google Apps for
Business (including Outlook through the Google Apps Sync tool), and a lot of
the most common requests we received were as follows:

\- Ability to forward multiple emails at once (as far as I know, native
support for this doesn't exist in Gmail, though an extension is available).

\- IMAP and POP3 are (surprisingly) still being utilised a lot more than you
may think; I once asked a customer why they were still using POP and they
explained that it helped them feel more in 'control' of their data as IMAP and
other forms of syncing are merely representations of the emails themselves
(including the WebUI), whereas POP3 gave them the ability to download a
physical copy to store away - they didn't fully trust the whole 'cloud'
concept and believed that segments (if not all) of their email could
potentially disappear sporadically, which wasn't entirely implausible.

\- Backups. These were often a concern for customers, and it was quite a while
until Google Vault was opened to end-users (at an extra charge). I feel it's
having that peace of mind that matters, and without that users often contacted
us requesting batches of messages to be restored, which can cause
complications based on the TOC regarding data protection.

\- Consistent visibility of all email accounts (particularly amongst Apple
Mail users); i.e. a list of each email account they own (regardless of
provider) on the left-hand panel showing the primary mailboxes (Inbox, Sent,
Drafts, etc.) This extended to iOS through the default Mail app (not sure if
this is still a limitation preventing this functionality with recent versions
of iOS).

\- Saving drafts or unread emails addressed to self as a way of keeping notes
and reminders. I do know that Gmail (unless they still do) allow you to
synchronise 'Notes' in iOS via native Mail app which then creates a 'Notes'
folder in Gmail, where each 'note' is stored as an email with minimal message-
body information. I found a lot of customers preferred this kind of ideal
rather than relying on another external solution for their notes.

\- Push notifications; something that IMAP doesn't support out the box, where
HTTPS protocols such as Exchange ActiveSync would be required for this.

\- Synchronising flags and categories for email (and contacts); something that
was never supported in Google Apps Sync.

\- Automatic setup of email based on incoming MX record values (like how
Thunderbird does it!)

\- Synchronisation of calendars, contacts, tasks, notes, etc. in addition to
email. This is often a common request, and where it was supported by the
Google Apps Sync tool, Apple Mail users would have to use separate tools
(iCal, Address Book, Tasks?) to synchronise these. Outlook 2011 was available,
but only synced email (unless cross-synchronised with iCal, quite messy).

Beyond feature requests, we frequently received reports from customers with
PST corruptions and where this may be partly due to incompatibilities with the
sync tool, PST does not seem like a stable format in which to store important
email data. I've also seen situations where mail clients (commonly Apple Mail
via IMAP) have deleted every message from the cloud mailbox store, resulting
in requests to restore these messages or the arduous process of dragging and
dropping those locally cached messages back into their Gmail mailbox -- those
were long, drawn out phone calls; good times :)

I reckon your biggest challenge will be not just be in providing native cross-
platform support, but rather cross-mail provider support. One of (if not the
most) of the common issues we received from users were IMAP bandwidth limits
being hit consistently, where Gmail imposes a limit on how much mail can be
synchronised an hour/day/month. This was frequently reported for Apple Mail,
to which I found related to the amount of active IMAP connections it keeps
open to the server, and the frequency of any resulting requests. I imagine
this was implemented for the sake of speed, but didn't play well with Gmail's
limits.

We had a small number of users that used Thunderbird and I found it to be
quite user-friendly compared to other mail clients I've tested; automatic
account setup and optional modules (for migrating mail, syncing other data,
etc.) being highlights here. I find the modular concept great here, and you
can see it being used in Gmail in the form of 'Labs'. Some users like to have
a minimal setup, so being able to choose your own features is a plus on many
levels.

That's most of what I can think of for the meantime and I hope it helps. Do
let me know if you'd like to discuss any of the above in more detail and I'll
provide any further feedback where I can.

Best of luck!

~~~
dropmailapp
Thank you! Your response is extremely helpful :-)

