Ask HN: I bought Polymail (YC S16), what should I do with it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I bought Polymail (YC S16), what should I do with it?

27 pointsryanmickle9 comments

Hey HN, as an early user of Polymail (https://polymail.io) and friend of the founders, I invested (with money I didn't really have as a broke founder) in the company because it filled the huge gap left when Mailbox was shuttered soon after its acquisition. I really love productivity and communications tools, and love the vision Polymail had, to create the "Slack for external communications."

After years of iterating and building a ton of power user features, the founders didn't see light at the end of the tunnel, were looking for a soft landing, and I really wanted to be sure the product stayed around. I'd used and loved Polymail for so long, tried all the newer superlative-laden email tools, and found everything else to be too clunky or complicated.

I think that email still has a massive distance to go, and it hasn't evolved enough since we all were sharing invites to get early access to Gmail.

I have my own experiences and ideas, but I'm curious what you think... what do you find most frustrating about managing email? What would make it worth paying for?

Finally if you're interested in productivity/email, I'd love to offer give you an extra long trial on Polymail in exchange for your feedback and guidance. Just let me know you're interested here: https://forms.gle/urn2dNYyEH5dcPuH9

Best features Polymail has offered has been mostly the augmentations over IMAP/POP3 stuff in other apps like Apple Mail. I'm talking about Unsubscribe, Block Sender, and Snooze. I used these a lot since joining Polymail.

However, I never found the ease of achieving Inbox Zero like I did with Mailbox. I don't think anything has gotten close to that, and I still miss it as I'm pretty sure it was the perfect mail app.

Polymail's read receipts were very useful, even after they got blurred out, it was still great to get the "Someone read..." notifications.

Signatures were so clean and synced across my devices without any problems.

Dislikes about Polymail (and stopping me from switching to a paid plan) - hard to refresh inbox (I still don't know how to force this apart from quit and reopen on Mac), the fact that it is not a native app (Electron or similar), weird behaviour when tapping a new push notification on iOS (sometimes the previously read email would stay open), just general non-native feelings.

I can't really justify the price and I never used any of the enterprise features, we use Slack for all that stuff, plus I am not a salesperson and if I were in the founder role of selling hard and raising money again I would probably invest in Superhuman.

As a thought, I will probably switch to Airmail as its $10 a year price point for a passive email user seems just right.

Best of luck with growing Polymail and good on you for giving it a new lease of life :)

Current polymail is expensive, the $13/month plan for 2 accounts is a joke.

With the $30/month plan, it's as expensive as superhuman, so unless you're going the enterprise way, forget it. I mean, most developer tools cost less than that.

And this is coming from someone who is begging to pay someone to just provide me an email client/service that:

1. Supports IMAP/Gmail/Etc

2. Has a clean UI (Features should be configs, not UI clutter, newton mail is a perfect example, I paid for it through all their comebacks and finally gave up when I noticed they gave up)

3. Supports common shortcuts (Gmail set the standard, so let me hit C to compose)

4. Do not add their branded weirdness (In Outlook CMD+R is reply, not refresh)

5. Give me privacy. My email is private, not for you to scan and sell my data and hide it somewhere in the TOS that you care for my privacy but might blah blah 3rd parties. No, leave it alone, there is business info in there, there is sensitive personal info in there period. Looking at you Spike and Edison mail.

6. Be fast: I want to open it quickly, get through my email quickly and quit quickly (Spark mail wants to sync my email when I hit CMD+Q, I dropped it)

7. Provide a seamless experience across desktop and mobile. I should not have to login to all my email accounts again on other devices. I know this means server, but as long as you guarantee point 5, I'm ok.

If this is just a client, $30 is too expensive. It has too many features that I'm not sure regular people really use/need. All the collaboration, calendar and integration features could be gone from the $13 plan, and limit to 5 accounts.

If you provide other services, like Proton does, I'd likely agree. Only reason I am not using Protonmail is it does not support other accounts, IMAP, etc.

Protonmail is also expensive, I hope they do A/B testing to see how many deals they lose for just having annual pricing (same price but 6 months may have more demand)

> forget it. I mean, most developer tools cost less than that.

Maybe developers shouldn't be OP's target market. As a group we tend to be some of the cheapest people when it comes to paying for software. I include myself in this. But trust me folks in other industries don't find $13/month to be a sticking point if it solves their problem.

In my opinion the website could be written to a much better job of explaining exactly what is being offered.

In the first 30 seconds of reading the website it's not obvious if you are providing an email account ie email hosting, or charging a monthly fee for some software.

Nowhere does it say "this is an email client that can connect to your existing IMAP account to use your existing email address and has features you need" which is what I guess it is.

I use Mailspring (previously I used Nylas Mail) just because it's what I'm used to... they do have neat features like pixel tracking (when your email is open by your recipient by sending an HTTP request to, say, an image) which is interesting.

But, to be honest, I think that the product space is not too big for email, we already communicate with so many tools that emails are left for just formal stuff (in my case) support tickets, contracts, updates, etc... there are but a few angles like privacy, but they kind of seem overcrowded (others are custom domain names, very intuitive UX, very good info about leads etc...)

I think you would have to get a really original angle, a true niche, something that has passed over everyone, and then the virality of it... I think intuitive UX is necessary but not sufficient; interested to see what you make of it, it's a good problem to solve

Most frustrating thing about email is that I get any at all (at work). We mostly use Slack, and emails are usually alerts from Github, JIRA or Azure. But it feels like there are too many of these alerts, and perhaps they shouldn't even be emails but something more lightweight, perhaps a slack message. Thinking about it that is probably possible to set up!

I am a fan of having fewer places to check anyway. If I can check my email via slack, and my Outlook calendar via slack then slack becomes the "one place". Not that I am a huge fan of slack (!) but I am just a big fan of having one place to go to to get a 'lay of the land' of what needs to be done today.

It looks like the main benefit is that its an email account with built in tracking of read receipts?

I don't see how that is useful in a world with Outlook.

Obviously I'm not your target demographic.

I use Airmail and I pay only $10 a year through Mac App Store. I used to use Polymail several years ago but after it started charging insane subscription, I dropped it immediately.

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