High-res
Monday morning @Mailbox swag! Thanks @elleluna & @gentry!
Showing 37 posts tagged email
High-res
Back in August, I wrote a post teasing Mailbox, the new app from the team behind Orchestra. Today, they’re ready to reveal a bit more. The video above offers a taste, but I’ll have more thoughts to share later on.
Put simply: this is the most excited I’ve been about an app in a long time. I’ve been testing it out for a few weeks now and it’s already the app I use most often. I say this, of course, as a happy investor, but I shit you not: if you hate email, you’re going to love this app when it comes out in a few weeks. It’s fucking amazing.
New Compose in Gmail
Nice(r). I’d still love to see an option for no subject — just who you’re sending it and what you’re sending. Or maybe even no body and just a subject line, actually. Reduce the clicks/tabs.
We’re getting closer to the “Gmail Lite” that I’ve long dreamed about. But Gmail is still nowhere near fast enough. I’m not sure it ever will be unless they do a native app. I do almost all my email now on the iPad.
Janet Napolitano Doesn't Use Email
Joseph Straw on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:
Asked if her reasons for sticking to other forms of communication had to do with concerns about email security, she hedged and said she avoids email for “a whole host of reasons.”
I envy her position there.
E-Mail at 47
Is email really 30 years old? Nope. It’s more like 47 years old. Technology historian Thomas Haigh sets the record state in an email to David Pogue:
Email, or electronic mail, is actually at least 40 years old, and the NY Times itself has documented its use in 1965 (47 years ago). Hence, collecting endorsements for the “30 year anniversary” claim, i.e. 1982 as the origin date for email, is an key strategy for Ayyadurai.
47 years old. This is a channel we all still use to communicate.
Harj Taggar's "No Email" Hack
Interesting post by Y Combinator partner Harj Taggar. Rather than fully quitting email, he simply removed it from his phone. This meant he could *only* check it when he was at a computer — you know, like the old days.
I’m pretty much the opposite these days — I enjoy checking and responding to it much more on my mobile devices instead of the desktop web because Gmail on the web is so much slower in every regard (the only real plus — and it’s a big one — in my mind is search).
Still, this is a pretty smart and simple hack to reclaim your day and your sanity. Sadly, I just don’t believe I can live in that mildly disconnected world. I have other plans.
High-res
Hmm, I’ve gotten notified about this a few times now so perhaps worth saying: if you get a spammy email from my name, it’s not from me. In fact, given how I feel about email, probably best to ignore all email from me — real or otherwise. Really, I won’t mind.
(via @wangye)
"It’s time to put email in its place."
This is the teaser page for Mailbox, a new product by the Orchestra team. I can’t say too much yet, but I’ve seen what they’re up to (we are investors, after all). It’s potentially game changing when it comes to email. And those who follow my email saga closely will know that I would not say that lightly.
They have a bit more about the process of evolving from Orchestra to Mailbox here. The best excerpt:
At first the idea seemed crazy. Email felt like this massive thing that startups don’t mess with. “This path is paved with corpses,” one friend told us. To be really blunt, we were scared. But as we explored the idea and the capacity of our team to tackle it, we felt emboldened. We realized we could apply everything we had learned about building fast, friendly, mobile collaboration tools to the inbox. We can’t replace email, but we can change how we interact with it.
Bingo. It’s not about replacing email. That has been tried and tried and tried and failed and failed and failed. It’s about changing the way we perceive email.
Mailbox is not quite done yet, but it will be worth the wait. Trust me.
Well, that was fun. Guess I’ll see ya in another 5 years, Hotmail.
Send No Email Day
OCTOBER 10 IS INTERNATIONAL SEND NO EMAIL DAY
I’m in.
Sparrow Flies The Coop
I first wrote about Sparrow in October 2010, gushing about the native Gmail experience it offered to Mac users. And I continued closely tracking its progression as both an interested writer, but also as a dedicated user. It was the first app that truly made Gmail beautiful on a Mac (and more recently, on iOS).
Along the way, I got to know founder Dom Leca a bit, so I’m very excited for him and his team today. There is no question that they will be able to tackle email problems on a whole new scale within Google, and I sincerely hope they do. We all need them to.
On the other hand, it sucks that development of Sparrow itself is stopping (though it will continue to be offered an supported). Thank god they got that Retina version out just in time for the new MacBook Pros. I use Sparrow on a daily basis to pound through email at a speed that Gmail on the web simply cannot handle.
That’s the thing: while Sparrow was beautiful and offered useful features like Facebook graph integration, it really moved things forward in terms of the UX of email. It’s a very hard problem because there are protocols and norms that have existed for decades that you have to work with. But Sparrow abstracted a lot of that and made it wonderful to do something as simple as reply with one click.
But at least Google seems well aware about Sparrow’s passionate user base and is thinking about why they were successful. Unprompted, they sent me the following statement this morning: “The Sparrow team has always put their users first by focusing on building a seamlessly simple and intuitive interface for their email client. We look forward to bringing them aboard the Gmail team, where they’ll be working on new projects.”
Congrats Dom, the Sparrow team, and Google. Now go fix email.
a blog by pud: Mass-Unsubscribe From Junk In Gmail
Here’s a clever way to mass-unsubscribe from spam, marketing emails, newsletters, and other stuff you don’t want clogging your inbox.
- In Gmail, do a search for “label:inbox unsubscribe OR email preferences OR subscribed OR newsletter” (without the quotes)
- Select (checkbox) the emails you want…
Brilliant.
