
Mail Pilot: Email Reimagined - alexobenauer
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-email-reimagined
======
alexknowshtml
"Your email is your to-do list".

This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what I want. I consider myself a reasonably
high-volume email recipient (>400 actionable emails a day on average).

The problem with "email as todo", which is a habit I had to work very hard to
train myself out of, is that it turns your inbox into a to-do list that others
can put things on.

This becomes the WORST to-do list ever.

With credit to Amy Hoy (Freckle, 30x500, etc): I believe that the problem is
that every email that comes into your inbox is painful because it is
associated with an unknown amount of work, and you don't know the amount of
work until you open and read it.

Amy's newest product, Charm, is a help desk tool built to solve THAT problem -
fundamentally decoupling the processing of email from the work that those
emails contain.

My workflow right now includes:

1) first line of defense assistant does triage, cleaning out things that I
don't ever need to see and either need deleting, or don't need my input. This
includes anything from FAQ to scheduling meetings, etc. 2) second line of
defense is answering emails that only need an answer - usually nothing more
than a sentence or two. 3) everything else that's left in my inbox requires
work. turning emails that do need my attention into todo's means that I can
work from a to-do list, or ideally the current day's to-do list with items
prioritized onto it with the help of an assistant.

I'm pretty sure that @sivers has a similar workflow that I've read about here
on HN, he may be able to comment more.

This makes email 10000000x less painful, and makes my to-do list less like
playing whack-a-mole. End of story: it's easier to get more work done. Email
is working for me instead of against me. _That_ is email nirvana, or as close
as I'm willing to accept today :)

Of course - the problem with this workflow is that it requires another human.
I don't know if that's avoidable. Truthfully, the people who I've hired who
work with my inbox I trust deeply. My inbox is a strange dichotomy of a place
that is private, but that anybody can send something into. He needs a lot of
context for making smart calls, and for me, I need to trust him to make those
calls.

Email clients need work - a lot of work - but this is more than renaming the
statuses of an email and showing me who I've emailed most recently with.

Take the work out of email, and put it where it belongs.

~~~
jodrellblank
_a to-do list that others can put things on. This becomes the WORST to-do list
ever._

If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other
people can put things on, don't you?

So what's the real problem with inbox-as-todo-list? That new work goes at the
top? That work and non-work are mixed? That one TODO item can be in several
revisions over many visually separated emails? That you can't track partially
done things?

~~~
mooism2
There is not a one-to-one correspondence between items in my inbox and items
on my todo list, and items in inbox don't necessarily say what I need to do.

e.g. an e-mail in my inbox asking me to clean the frobulator might translate
to one of the following todo lists:

a) 1. clean the frobulator

b) 1. buy frobulator cleaning fluid 2. empty the frobulator 3. clean the
frobulator 4. refill the frobulator 5. reply to sender informing them that the
frobulator is now clean

c) 1. reply to sender telling them why I can't/won't clean the frobulator

d) (no action necessary)

But my inbox won't help me remember which of these is the case. And that's ok,
because that's not what it's for. That's what my todo list is for.

~~~
alexknowshtml
That's part of the issue.

But this application proposal - and many peoples' workflows for everything
from day-to-day email to customer support treat their inboxes as to-do lists.
It's a bad habit, one I had myself and had to work HARD to break. An email
interface that trains people out of that habit, or keeps people from forming
it, would improve productivity for a lot of people without them even realizing
it.

------
waseemsadiq
So 3 years ago I had _exactly_ the same idea. I executed on it, built an email
client and it was basically a commercial failure (although we ended up
licensing some of our stuff).

So here is my advice: don't even bother unless you want to build a small
lifestyle business (and don't even bother dreaming of a subscription model).

Email has been around for 20 something years and the usage patterns are so
engraved in users mindsets there is no way you can get them out of that
experience. The whole idea around productivity will only appeal to a small set
of power users.

If you really are set on building this thing then here is a howto: 1\. go
here: <https://github.com/waseems/inbox2_desktop> 2\. fork the code 3\. add a
todo list 4\. compile and profit (well probably not)

Sorry for being so cynical but I have been there :-)

------
tmcw
Does anyone feel like there's something really odd about using Kickstarter to
fund proprietary software? Like some of the other Kickstarter projects that
fund patented inventions. Like, if you want to launch a proprietary product,
_do that_. The way of making money doing that would be to _do that_, not to
raise it in some odd fashion, from people who won't actually benefit from it,
or own any stake in the idea or profits, beyond 'above a level', a 'copy' of
the application or an account?

~~~
pingswept
I don't think it's odd, but I'm _much_ more likely to contribute to something
open source than proprietary on Kickstarter. With open source, if the project
fails, the parts of the project still be useful to the world. Not so much with
proprietary stuff.

------
llambda
The concept looks interesting. I was sold on it and then, "backers will get a
steeply marked down subscription." Wait, a what? Subscription? Sorry, you lost
me. No way will I pay a subscription fee to use an email program. Apart from
that, as a standalone app, it sounds compelling.

~~~
yottabyte47
Sending/receiving data (in this case email) uses energy. Since energy is not
currently free, someone has to pay for it.

A service that involves the repeated sending/receiving of data, (in this case
email) incurs a cost over time that someone has to pay for.

There are three solutions to this issue:

A. Run a free service until you run out of money. (not sustainable)

B. Run a free service subsidized by ads. (user-hostile and possibly
unsustainable)

C. Charge the user a subscription fee. (fair and sustainable)

Unfortunately, the perception that email and other services should be free has
permeated society. The internet made the transfer of information cheaper by
many orders of magnitude, but it is still not free.

~~~
citricsquid
You're ignoring the fact that the $35,000 they're trying to raise is listed as
being for exactly that:

> Where the money will go... Hosting. We need some serious hosting space to
> deploy our storage-intensive services.

~~~
sbronstein
Yeah, its actually pretty dumb IMO that they say the money will go to hosting.
With AWS etc you only use what you pay for and the costs should be pretty
minimal for beta testing and then covered by subscription fees once they
launch.

Money going towards mobile dev makes more sense although is much more risky to
back given the short timeframe and limited budget even if they meet their
goal.

------
chime
That is a very good idea. I do something very similar with Gmail Priority
Inbox + Google Calendar already but it's very slightly more work. I have for
categories in my Inbox: Starred, Calendar, Todo, Everything else.

* Starred are things I'm following until they are done - similar to the complete/incomplete feature they mention. It includes emails like Amazon shipments, work-in-process items, long email threads etc. The label doesn't matter.

* Calendar section is automated deadline-driven todos that must be done - paying bills, saying Happy B'days etc. It's similar to their timelines feature but I don't have an easy way to say 'Remind me about this email in June'. Instead, I use the label 'Someday' and once a week or so, go through my Someday emails and star them if necessary. If Priority Inbox allowed me to add 5 sections instead of 4, I would just make Someday one of the section too and be done with it.

* Todo section is very similar to Mark for Review and I just add the 'Todo' label to emails when I can't deal with them immediately but plan on doing so in the near future. 'Someday' is for when I want to push it off for a few weeks or months.

* Everything else is all other incoming emails. If I archive them, they're gone. If I star them, it means I want to track their progress. If I add 'Todo' / 'Someday' label, it means I intend to work on them soon or someday.

Gmail offers almost all the other benefits they mention, including multiple-
mailbox, autopilot (filters/rules), and tons of intelligence. Personally, I
don't mind sticking to Gmail for now but this type of approach to email
validates my current practices and hopefully improves how all of us manage
with email.

------
struppi
Oh. This is about an email _program_. I thought they would try to attack
smtp+pop+imap and try to solve some of the problems with how email works. That
would be a really hard and interesting (albeit probably fruitless) challenge!

Edit: Anyway, this project looks pretty cool - even with the subscription.
I've backed it.

------
deweller
Delivery date of June, 2012?

I know you probably think 4 months is a _long_ time, but it is a probably not
near long enough to develop something this complex.

Be prepared for that schedule to slip.

------
mgkimsal
mixed reactions to this.

admirable to want to tackle a big problem, and 'make your own dream job'.

'if email actually worked'.

"worked" for whom? The fundamental problem as I see it with approaches like
this is that email is a multiparty system, and it won't "work" for your life
because other people don't share your views of how email should "work".

"For example, send all messages you've been CC'd in to be reviewed when you
have more time"

You're assuming that someone who cc'ed me on something doesn't want a response
right now.

"automatically have responses to a job opening put into a specific review
list"

Assuming people email in with appropriate subject headings or specific text.

There's as many different ways people use email as there are people just
about, and email is almost always a two-or-more-way street. Modifying how I
consume and use email on my end can be helpful, but only to the extent that it
doesn't violate the process on the other end.

I didn't see anything about an API in there. Having an API to program against
would be useful, and an API that would be able to work against the multiple
aggregated providers would be really useful. Scriptable incoming email
processing (not necessarily realtime, but close) that could move your mail
around and integrate with other services would be really useful too.

"Email requires action"

If that's your fundamental premise, I can see how that would shape your
thinking and design. It might not actually be wrong, but I'm not sure it's
necessarily right, or at least right for a lot of people. Unless you count
"reading" and "delete" as actions too.

Subscription software - not necessarily against that, but I'm presuming this
will be 'on the web' hosted? Not local to my desktop? Hrm...

Something I'd like to see is good search and ability to search through related
messages _while_ I'm reading a specific message already. This is broken in
every mail client I've tried. I can read, or I can search, but not both
(without multiple tabs in web-based mail clients). Reading a message and not
being able to get more context and info from previous conversations is
frustrating.

Good luck!

~~~
jasonlotito
> You're assuming that someone who cc'ed me on something doesn't want a
> response right now.

I'm just focusing on this, not to argue with you, but to point out something
that irks me.

If you want a reply from me, send an email TO me. If you simply want me to be
aware of something at some point, CC is fine. But if you want a reply, and you
CC me, you've given me no indication without me having to read the email.

I despise the practice of using CC as if the TO field can only contain one
email. I make it a point to send an email TO people I want a response from,
and CC those who don't need to respond.

~~~
mgkimsal
I know many people operate this way, but it's not standard enough. I get
people who CC me on stuff because they want the primary person to feel like
they're the real decision maker, and the CCed people are supposed to chime in
if we want to support or vote down the email's content. Who is CCed and who is
TOed can be something of a political game. Not saying it _should_ , but it is.

~~~
jasonlotito
I understand. =)

I've fought back against this very thing (and was fairly successful with the
results). It required a lot of force and careful wording.

"No, you didn't send anything _to_ me. You did copy me a message you sent to
someone else, however."

I went out of my way to filter all emails CC'ed to me to another folder called
review, and I would review it at the end of the day, or maybe the next day. It
took a lot of standing ground and being blunt with people, but eventually it
started to work. Before I left, there was discussion on improving email
communication, and making it clear to everyone in the company the difference
between CC and TO, and how to use them, when to use them, and what to expect.

I'd hate to think what I'd say if I was in the middle of your situation. I
don't play the political game well. =)

------
bcx
Always cool to see more Hokies doing cool things :-). Turns out there are a
lot of resources in town for this sort of thing:

Dr. Perez in Computer Science, he actually has done a ton of research in how
individuals use information (PIM) including email.

It might be useful to do some competitive analysis as well:
<http://www.boomeranggmail.com/> (attempts solves the 'do this later problem')

As your probably aware MailTrust created by Hokie Pat Mathews and bought by
Rackspace still has a pretty big office. I'd track him down and get some
feedback from him.

My two cents, feel free to reach out ben at olark.

~~~
alexobenauer
Hey Hokie! Thanks for the post.

Pat Matthews actually emailed me this afternoon, which I was honored to be on
the receiving end of.

I know of Dr. Perez, and definitely need to reach out.

Boomerang is interesting, and validated our need to go to subscription
billing. Thanks for sending along that link.

------
ChristianMarks
"If email actually worked" then there would be some way to know whether email
was sent and delivered--something like software transactional memory for email
with logs that could be exchanged and mutually verified for consistency among
emailing parties. (I'm supposed to be in a research position, but I have other
academics nagging me about email delivery. There are constant problems with
dropped email, mysterious rules that "helpful" email clients silently add that
trash incoming messages, and no accountability from our local IT dept.)

~~~
cake
Email is just fine for me, I don't understand why people need to pretend they
reinvent it every other week (social email, todo list email...).

The only thing I'm missing is on the technical side, a transaction system like
you describe.

How great would it be if all the servers could reply to my mail client : I
have received your email it isn't considered spam and the end user got it.

~~~
ChristianMarks
You get upvoted for agreeing with me that some sort of end-to-end verification
service protocol is missing. Now there's a schlep if ever there was.

------
Pheter
My issue with email is that it is hard to quickly extract the information that
I need from it. This issue does not usually stem from what the sender has
written, but how it has been sent, and how various email clients interpret the
message.

Threaded email conversations were a step in the right direction, but I've yet
to come across an implementation that _just works_. I wish email clients were
designed to look more like instant messaging applications by abstracting away
everything in the body apart from the actual content.

Most clients handle replies acceptably most of the time, but I also want to
see signatures gone (perhaps recognising phone numbers and adding them to my
address book) and automatic re-formatting forwarded emails so that it looks
like it was sent directly to me.

Of course sitting back and complaining is lazy and unproductive, perhaps I
should have a go at building an email client that abstracts away the
frustrating parts of email.

Edit: I'm envious of a lot of collaborative communication apps that exist but
unfortunately everyone has to be using it which is a barrier to entry that it
some circumstances, is just too high. I envision a similar tool that is built
on top of email as a standalone application (web and/or desktop). This would
afford the benefits of making communication a much quicker and easier to
manage process, while not requiring anyone you need to communicate with to
change their process.

------
huhtenberg
Subscription-based consumer desktop program. Wow. It'd be very interesting to
see how this unfolds.

(edit) Just read the comments on Kickstarter, and it _is_ a service with a
desktop interface, meaning proxying all emails through a two-person company.
Privacy, security and reliability are just some issues that they have to
address.

------
halayli
> At it's core email is a list of messages that require further actions.

That's not always the case, in fact I read a lot more than I write emails.

I feel they took one use case of email and tried to solve it. Email is
complicated because it has plenty of use cases and everyone uses it
differently.

------
corkill
Email basically is other peoples TODO list for YOU.

Product look kinds of cool but the statement that every email needs to be
actioned turns me wayyyy off.

Email is pretty much the worst productivity tool ever. Mainly because the
second you freaking open it you hit the Inbox, which can contain stuff from
relatives, spam or assorted marketing messages. Lots of stuff that should
never have made it there in the first place. Even if something useful arrives
it's so unlikely that it is the number 1 thing you should be working on.

But yeah will be interesting to see how they look at it.

------
Corrado
One of the things that looks interesting to me is the aggregation function. I
currently have multiple email accounts and I have to have 3 (or more) browser
tabs open to deal with them all. It would be very handy to be able to go to
one place and get all of my mail.

One downside I can see with this is making sure that I'm responding to the
correct message from the correct email address. Mixing up work and home
accounts would not be good.

~~~
shawnc
I needed this a few years ago badly. I ended up forwarding all email to my
gmail. Then... And this is considered excessive by some... I forwarded all
those to a MobileMe account and check it all in Apple Mail. It automatically
detects what email address my email came to and when I reply that's the email
it will show from. Works great and haven't changed my setup since.

From there you can create rules and whatever else you need to.

------
savrajsingh
Having worked at Microsoft, I saw several PMs attempt to reimagine email over
4 years there--eventually all the radical changes get cut time and time again.
MS employees might as well just submit kickstarter projects-- get outside
funding and maybe even reintegrate into MS products :)

------
sjs
I'm sure some people will find this useful, but it seems to be the way I
already use email. I don't have to deal with a lot of email so maybe this has
more use for those who do.

If it's in my inbox it needs my attention. If not it's archived or deleted. To
enter review mode I go to my inbox.

------
ozten
This sounds like a lot of clicking. I don't want to manage my email _even
more_ than I already do.

Maybe have email be read by default and have the ability to mark it as a
task... or make a gmail addon that lets you import an email into your GTD app.

------
helipad
Wanting to get email to "work" is a noble effort, but that means different
things to different people.

A more intuitive user interface will sadly not magically transform email into
something usable.

Receiving fewer emails, might.

------
NegativeOne
I might pay a one-time amount for this kind of application, but a subscription
service to manage email ? Not going to happen.

------
imjared
The idea of email not going away after I've read it and being a to-do list
sounds slightly terrifying.

I'll stick to my Gmail for now.

------
bobowzki
I'm sick and tired of to-do list apps...

------
bwb
Weird my email seems to be working fine :), checking it out though!

------
mcantelon
Interesting to see a startup funded by Kickstart rather than VC.

------
spindritf
So basically GMail with elaborate filters and better search?

------
antidaily
Feels like an app, not a monthly subscription.

------
shapeshed
email sucks. collaborative tools are what you should be backing VCs!

------
shocks
Is it cross-platform?

~~~
alexobenauer
By the time we're out of beta, we will be launching on Mac / Windows / Linux,
32 & 64 bit. Mobile will initially include iOS, Android, and some Blackberry
models. A subsequent release will hopefully also include Windows Phone.
Finally, we will also launch with a web and a mobile web version.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

------
wavephorm
Other than introducing a new interface I don't understand what new concept is
being introduced here. It doesn't sound like they're putting hooks from the
email client into other programs, which is really what needs to happen. Email
itself could generally go away if instead of asking questions people could
send little "applets" that would open inline with the message, and can
directly accomplish the task being asked of you.

So instead of sending an email to manually write contact info, someone could
send me a "request: contact info" message. Then when I receive that message, I
just click one button called "Activate" which would automatically fill out my
contact info and fire off an auto-generated response.

The number of times in a year that I have write my name, email, address, phone
etc is mindnumbingly stupid. I should be able to have an email program that
can auto-fetch all this type of information and more.

