Mail Pilot announces public beta | Hacker News Reader

Mail Pilot announces public beta

mailpilot.co

26 pointsalexobenauer13 comments

Mail Pilot is excellent. I helped fund it as one of many people on Kickastarter, and I'm so pleased with Alex and Josh.

The fundamental insight is that mail is essentially an inbound task list, and to help you field these tasks as smoothly as possible. It's a big time-saving improvement over Gmail labels and Outlook folders.

Working on mobile is especially good, with iOS and Android apps. I have an iPhone and Nexus, so it's great to be cross-platform.

Kudos to the team!

This sounds awful (even though the product looks slick): The problem with email is that people use it as a to-do list which anyone can add things to. I'm constantly struggling to move away from using my inbox for this very purpose — why empower it?!

(I'd also note that Outlook has very similar (less pretty) features built in too.)

Yes, we're all constantly struggling with email because mail clients aren't built for triage or tracking. Mail Pilot changes this.

I do everything I can to use dedicated task tools like Asana, Basecamp, Do, etc. yet I still get dozens of emails daily from a wide range of business contacts and I need to manage these. Mail Pilot is great for these because it's lightweight, fast, and works with everyone who emails me.

Launching Summer 2012?

This looks really interesting but I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy using it day to day. Having the 'review in the future' type of features integrated into a standard mail client would be nice though. That said, if this handles high quantities of messages better/faster than mail.app or sparrow i'll definitely use it just for the speed improvement.

Right. In Mail Pilot, one of the best features is to mark an email as "Complete/Incomplete". This lets you quickly read an email and still track that you want to return to it later because you want to do something for it.

"The apps are free but the service is paid for." Is there any useful functionality in the apps which doesn't rely on the paid-for service?

Looks cool. I personally use my inbox as a pseudo-task list or ongoing task list most of the time. That being said you run into the issue of tasks that aren't emails. Do you email yourself? Create a new task that is an email? Do you create a task that only lives in the application and therefore not synced with your devices?

Just curious: doesn't anyone still get emails which are more social and thinking in nature, and not tasks? Like (gasp) paper letters? Has everyone moved to Facebook messages for this purpose?

I do, too.

Unfortunately, the thing I am usually supposed "to do" with an email is reply to it, in which case, what I actually need is a better way to keep track of my emails overall, and a faster, simpler way to be a part of the conversation. A literal "to do list" solution seems like it would simplify manual sorting, which is treating the symptom, not the cause.

Or maybe that's just me.

I do.

Though I let them sit around in my inbox as a reminder to reply to them in an equally thoughtful manner. Sigh.

Sounds cool, I'll be interested to see try it out on launch.

Are you using Titanium? Wunderkit ran into a lot of trouble, i believe, partly due to using Titanium.

I can't find the open beta part or more information about linux but I hope they didn't use adobe air and still think it is compatible with linux.

I'll come back when they support Exchange via https.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com