Ask HN: What are your email dreams?

[dropmailapp]

Hey Hacker News,

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.

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.

Thanks!

[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 :-).

[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 :-)

[miguelrochefort]

They probably cloned some popular email client. Now they're wondering how to make it into something people want.

Such a wrong way to approach thing.

[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.

[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 :-)