> "The market that we're going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work accounts,"<p>I'm glad they're only aiming at a small group of people who actually have problems with email. The weekly "re-invent email" posts are getting quite tiresome, the majority of people have absolutely no problem with email, email is an incredibly simple concept and it works for almost everyone.
I already built this back in 2009<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-communications-stream-to-rule-them-all/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-commun...</a><p>And here is the desktop client which is now open-source: <a href="http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg</a><p>People do not need this and will not leave their existing email clients because they simply do not see email as being 'stagnated'. It works and gets the job done.<p>There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them.<p>My advice to you would be to go build on top of for example gmail. There are massive number of things that suck horribly. Yes, search is one of them.<p>Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work.<p>The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com
Can we put the actual url in [1]<p>Looks very inspired by by Sparrow.app [2](OS X mail application). Though they have improved on the UI in some aspects.<p>Great that people are still trying to make email better.<p>[1] <a href="http://fluent.io" rel="nofollow">http://fluent.io</a><p>[2] <a href="http://sparrowmailapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sparrowmailapp.com/</a>
Congrats to Fluent! Great design and a slick UI.<p>The stream view is an interesting concept, but we've found that many people don't have a nice inbox of messages as shown in the preview. In fact, it's quite the opposite: messages from friends, family, and coworkers are often overwhelmed by notifications, newsletters, and mailing lists. However, your Amazon shipping and Twitter notifications aren't spam, you just don't want to see them in the same context.<p>I'm working on Glider (<a href="http://glider.io" rel="nofollow">http://glider.io</a>), a fix for the mess in your inbox. You already know which kinds of emails are important to you, so instead of obscuring that information, we think the best solution is to sort and display emails by sender and context.<p>We did a soft launch on HN a few weeks ago (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917</a>), and would love to know what you guys think. Good luck as well to the Fluent team!
"we sort of present you with the information that you need <i>to immediately action on it</i>."<p>Really? <i>Really?</i><p>I expect better from my fellow Australians, even if they <i>are</i> Sydney-siders.
Is e-mail that freaking broken for everyone?<p>I must seriously not have the same problems. With gmail spam filters and priority inbox the last thing I need is to visualize my e-mails in a twitter like stream.<p>I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails me something akin to a personal letter.
<i>standard gripe about technologies being declared "dead" merely because they are no longer growing, rather than because they are suffering from a vanishingly tiny user-base</i>
The attachment feature alone is a something I would pay for; I deeply miss Xoopit an we'll-organize-your-attachments plugin which gave my inbox a life. I also like how you can view message and reply without having to go to a new page. The only problem I see is it's taking me away from my comfort zone (gmail).
We've been thinking hard about innovating email. Interestingly, I don't think reading the emails is where the real problems are, its in composing the emails.
What I'd really like to see is a P2P, encrypted, bittorrent-based mail system, basically something that works similar to bitcoin, but used for sending encrypted mail instead.<p>No central servers, just a single blockchain recording all encrypted messages on the network and shared over a bittorrent network, and an easy-to-use client that doesn't make normal people think too hard.<p>Encrypt a message with your recipient's public key, submit it to the network, it's accepted into the blockchain, and they decrypt it on the other end with their private key when the msg propagates to their client. Private (at least until computing power catches up with the encryption algorithm), decentralized email without ads, popups, etc.<p>Give it a nice Apple-ish/fluent.io-ish/sparrow-ish interface, transparent encrypting and decrypting, and some way of optionally associating email addresses with public keys so normal users don't have deal with intimidating hashes (optional only though, still want the ability to send directly to more anonymous public keys).<p>While you'd still need some method of preventing block chain forking, you wouldn't have to worry as much about double spending and transaction verification since you don't care whether someone sends the same message multiple times to different recipients (as you do with bitcoin).<p>One of the biggest problems would be dealing with exponentially increasing blockchain size. Bitcoin already has this problem and its transactions consist only of relatively terse amounts of data. With full emails (and attachments?) you'd have to implement a method of cropping and perhaps archiving the blockchain, or otherwise solving that problem, or it will quickly become unweildy and destroy the user experience (esp for people with slow connections).<p>Perhaps clients store the blockchain a certain number of blocks back, and then beyond that they only store their own sent and received messages? Not sure...<p>The genius of bitcoin is that it is a solution to a difficult algorithmic problem in distributed systems [1] which can be repurposed for other implementations. It is already being repurposed for a distributed DNS [2] and distributed voting systems for elections [3], why not a distributed encrypted email system as well?<p>Just throwing this out there without really thinking it through thoroughly atm... Thoughts? Feasible? Probably the biggest problem is knowing that one day all your emails would essentially become public domain when hardware catches up...<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origi...</a><p>2. <a href="http://dot-bit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://dot-bit.org/</a><p>3. ddg-fu failing me atm, will add this later.
My new take on email: leave it alone and go fix something that's actually broken.<p>I'll take an open source clone of Gmail, thank you very much, especially as they continue messing with the interface for the sake of it and with the privacy policy for kicks.<p>While we're at it, I'll also take an implementation of conversations in ThunderBird, to make it more like Sparrow, which is quite nice on the desktop.
The best thing Gmail has going for it are the shortcuts. They're the best feature for ripping through an email backlog. I hope anybody working on an email client includes shortcuts for everything. Once you get used to them, it's painful touching your mouse.
Is it my imagination or is this a lot like the vision for Mozilla Raindrop. I was quite disappointed that they started talking about it and then stopped work on it almost at the same time. The ability to pump all of your messaging into a single client and have it prioritise what was important seemed a no-brainer to me.<p>I'd love to have rss/tweets/fb/g+ updates alongside emails for people I care about rather than maintaining increasingly complex methods of keeping up to date with each in different apps
To me, this looks like webmail to read webmail. Pretty though. I doubt I'll use it, as it's another entity to trust with my privacy. If it was a replacement for Gmail entirely I'd consider it.<p>I'm still searching for a decent desktop email client, something that looks like this and works on both Windows 7 and Mac OSX. It's a shame that this is a web app, it doesn't solve any problem that I have.
Slick interface and the instant search makes me want to use the product.<p>But I like and trust email because it is stagnate. How is this different than Buzz (dead) or my other 'streams' like G+/Facebook/Twitter? I don't want my email to be a stream, because if I miss one, that could be devastating. I don't want email to evolve, because it is the only thing I can trust that won't become realtime.
If the mail is still hosted at google, hosted in the USA with all the government snooping and extreme paranoia and everyone is out to get us attitude, with the NSA, CIA and whatever other corporate/government crime syndicate reading it, then it fails to fix the biggest flaw in gmail. And that is the lack of privacy.
Looking at these comments it seems I am the only one blown away by this. It's amazing! Email for the social network generation. We've become accustomed to feeds, and for a good reason: it's efficient.<p>The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more is such a great time-saving feature.
"Email has "stagnated" and three Australians who quit Google say they have built a product that will change the way we interact with email and allow us to get through our bulging inboxes "20 per cent faster"."<p>Google Wave anyone?
It is a nice idea but to me it seems more suitable as an app for tablet/smartphone then a replacement for GMail. I wonder if they're just aiming to get bought out by Google.
E-mail is stagnated not because of technologic restrictions. Beautiful UI though!<p>This is a people problem, not a technology one. Sorry, just don't see it 'fixing' a problem.
It reminds me of a similar service, ZeroMail [1] (also from Australia). The UI for Fluent is intuitive, and a nice break from Gmail (esp. with Gmail's new look).<p>Given the influx of e-mails I get a day from listservs, friends, business contacts, customers and random services (Groupon et al.), I see this already busy interface getting cluttered very fast. That said, I only tried the demo and would be interested to see what it looks like on my actual inbox with real people.<p>[1] <a href="http://zeromail.com/" rel="nofollow">http://zeromail.com/</a>
aside: how/why did the title change from the original that I posted? (I gave a title, but it seems to have forgotten that and reverted to the article?)
With Gmail's "new" interface, I am finding it more and more cumbersome to navigate around. I practically run my business through Gmail - so it's great to see another stab at this interface to make things more meaningful and practical. Goodluck with Fluent.