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Show HN: Kanmail – An email client that functions like a kanban board

271 points by Fizzadar 6y ago

usrme 6y ago
If there are people out there who are well invested into Gmail, then here's an alternative (https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-...) that does not require a separate client application. The initial concept is focused on desktop usage, but with a small modification it can be adapted to mobile-based working as well.
- abendy 6y ago
  For years I've used Gmail Filters to apply labels to specific "from" addresses. Takes a bit to set up as I have very long "from(@domain.com OR @domain2.com OR ...)" queries but ideally I'm also unsubscribing from newsletters etc. that I don't want. I also use multiple inboxes as well. First, "Starred" (different colored stars means different things to me and this strategy is used consistently across multiple platforms inc macOS labels, Trello etc.), then "Alerts" (critical emails from various systems), then "Important and Unread", then everything else. Most emails are not "important" and I do actively unsubscribe so the method is manageable for me. The last thing I need is my email inbox to be a giant todo list. Most important are tech/work related, current projects, finance/business. I try not to sign up for anything that I need to read, newsletters etc. That's what RSS is for. Email is for quick actionable item and some communication.
  - j45 6y ago
    This approach works well, until you have to click on a star in each mail 4 or 5 times to get it to turn into a purple star, etc.
    - abendy 6y ago
      I star a handful of emails max. each day. Not laborious at all considering the work load offloaded to Gmail's filters and I use a red, orange, yellow, & green star system.
- anthonybullard 6y ago
  When I was at Google, Tim Sneath taught this same workflow to the whole team. It was the only way to handle the Google scale email firehose. Now that I'm in an Outlook shop, been looking for a way to replicate it.
- stephen 6y ago
  Amazing. If someone from Slack is on this thread, you can please implement the todo/waiting reply/etc. tagging/view-by-tag UX shown in the ^ post?
  - avel 6y ago
    You can already do an inbox-zero-like workflow in slack. In Prefereneces -> Sidebar set slack to only show "Unreads and starred conversations". This reduces the list of channels to these two things. (Edit: it might be a good idea to star all conversations that need followup, first). Muted channels (which I make use of a lot) will still not trigger notifications, but now you'll know that, if it appears in the sidebar, there are unreads there. I star any conversations that comes up and needs followups or actions. When I'm done with it, I unstar it and it goes away. This has worked wonders for me and I highly suggest the same workflow to everyone. Note that after the latest Slack update, it should be possible to make use of the groups feature and use them together with the workflow above. This way you can have multiple statuses like TODO, awaiting reply and delegated, like in the parent article, rather than a single set of starred conversations. So far I haven't felt the need for this personally. Oh and one more thing. In Preferences -> messages and media set it to "Compact", it will declutter the UI a bit.
    - aantix 6y ago
      I like the workflow. It seems reactionary. I always considered the advantage of real-time chat is that it was more conducive to socializing. To injecting a bit of your personality. Is it antisocial to only respond to that which is asked?
      - kchr 6y ago
        Hiding the list of conversations doesn't medan you have to keep away from them. You can still jump to windows and write to people using the search bars and commands! :-)
- errnoh 6y ago
  Decided to try this out. The instructions are mostly up-to-date, main thing that has changed seems to be that the multiple inboxes option is now under Settings->Inbox->Inbox type->Multiple Inboxes
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I've been using it for years but I can't figure out how to make it work on mobile. Gmail mobile (web and app) simply doesn't have those various icons for stars. What's that small modification?
  - usrme 6y ago
    Use labels instead of those icons. If you scroll to the very bottom of the link I provided, then it's mentioned there.
ThePhysicist 6y ago
That look super slick, congrats on launching it! It still looks a bit "noisy" to me, maybe you can reduce the information density a little as to me it seems a bit overwhelming. Super useful idea though and surely something that can be a success!
- Fizzadar 6y ago
  Thank you! Agreed re:noisy-ness there's a lot going on currently; will be looking into tweaking that!
ppadron 6y ago
this looks amazing, will try it out. having the option show messages from all accounts at once is a blessing for me.
- yodon 6y ago
  It amazes me that Outlook mobile will let me see all my email from all my accounts in one list but Outlook desktop will not.
mmPzf 6y ago
I'm a bit confused by the "open source but not free" statement in the readme. How common is it to refer to software with public source code as "open source"? I always thought the "open source" label applied only to those licenses officially certified as open source.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  Yes, it's a misuse of the term "open source". It should be described as "source-available" [0], not "open source". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
  - z3t4 6y ago
    Many popular "open source" projects are also not free...
    - mmPzf 6y ago
      Can you name some examples? According to the internet for most practical purposes the terms "open source" and "free software" refer to the same set of licenses [0] [0]: https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-software https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-sof...
      - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
        Asperite is open source and not free.
        orangeshark 6y ago
        Aseprite is not Free and Open Source software. It is source available though.
      - Beaver117 6y ago
        Elasticsearch
tjwds 6y ago
Very cool! It looks like the primary focus here is displaying the messages in multiple folders at the same time; I like the message opens where it has space to open. The account management settings page mentions needing an application password for Gmail — you'll also need one to add a Fastmail account (it looks like it retrieves through IMAP and sends through SMTP). When I added an account, the account's existing folders weren't displayed to me anywhere (I was expecting the sidebar), but it looks like you can add a column for an existing folder and it'll just work. It also looks like the action of dragging a message from one column to another removes it from one folder and adds it to another, which makes sense for a kanban board, but might get a little weird with Fastmail's labels mode, where a message can exist in multiple folders! (https://beta.fastmail.com/help/receive/labels-beta.html https://beta.fastmail.com/help/receive/labels-beta.html)
- Fizzadar 6y ago
  Thank you for the feedback, this is incredibly helpful! - Regarding the new account message I shall update this to point at the providers page (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/81 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/81) - I like the idea of auto populating sidebar folders (without causing cluter, one to investigate) (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/82 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/82) - Originally Kanmail did copy emails between folders/labels (matching Gmail) but moving emails is more IMAP friendly in general. However, perhaps an option to copy is the best solution here, giving the end user the choice (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/83 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/83)
lettergram 6y ago
I actually setup something similar years ago with a gmail add-on. Was pretty intuitive and liked it. It would be advantageous to add additional features over this such as: 1. Adding points or estimated workloads to emails. 2. Adding notes to emails 3. Snooze emails (which would drop their priority on the board, but stay in the same lane until post snooze). 4. Highlight who is in the discussion thread. 5. Rules for lanes of work (for instance potentially emails from boss should go straight to “in progress”)
- Fizzadar 6y ago
  Thank you for the feedback, these are some really interesting ideas :) 1/2/3: It could be possible to implement points/notes/snoozes by using (abusing?) IMAP folders to store such information. Ideally such information would live on the server-side such that it would sync between devices (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/84 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/84 / https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/85 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/85). 4: Great idea, long threads make this really hard to see currently! (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/86 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/86) 5: Currently possible using Gmail filters, but not part of the client itself of course. Would be really interesting to implement this! (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/87 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/87)
strogonoff 6y ago
Kanmail is built using pywebview, which is an interesting alternative to Electron. Lighter distributions thanks to using respective OS’s native web view.
tmikaeld 6y ago
Would love it if any client would support grouping all messages per senders unique email and topic, sorted by date. The result is almost like a conversation. It makes it easier to see each topic as well. So far, I've only seen "Unibox" client on MacOS do this. (Not updates since 2018)
- medecau 6y ago
  I think the upcoming hey.com service is going to do something similar to that.
  - tmikaeld 6y ago
    Huh, very interesting. Seems to be created by Basecamp, so will certainly be reliable.
reacharavindh 6y ago
I have been wanting an email client where I can simply drag and drop emails as a TO-DO Kanban board. I will definitely give this a try.
lukevp 6y ago
This looks great! I’ll give it a try. Congrats on launching! Email is a great communication mechanism, but as a manager, it’s so hard to corral the process of following up on emails that take many days for people to do. It would be awesome if each column could have a suspended area at the bottom and I could set due dates and they would sort into that separate section until they are due.
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
If this were solely a Gmail extension I would be 100% in and pay about $25/month.
- krembo 6y ago
  Checkout 2 alternatives implemented as Chrome extensions: * https://yanado.com/ https://yanado.com/ * https://www.sortd.com/ https://www.sortd.com/
- freediver 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what ties you to Gmail?
mohammedhdotio 6y ago
I've been doing Thunderbird with quick folder extension to achieve near the same functionality however in Tabbed view. nonetheless a great idea. will test it soon.
choeger 6y ago
The package.json in that repository says "MIT". How does that work with the propietary license agreement? I also wonder if the author has any way to prevent copyleft code entering their project. What would be a nuisance for a free software project could potentially kill a commercial one like this. I do not mean this as a comment against copyleft or this particular project, I am really interested to know if there is a Semi-Automatic license scanner.
- Fizzadar 6y ago
  Thank you for spotting this will update the package.json license field now. As for external code this is somewhat manual - yarn has a really helpful `yarn licenses` (https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/licenses https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/licenses) which removes a lot of the pain for the JS side!
- erjiang 6y ago
  License scanning is a big deal for enterprise, especially the ones deeply afraid of any "GPL infection". Black Duck is one such vendor of license scanning software.[0] [0] https://www.blackducksoftware.com/ https://www.blackducksoftware.com/
  - rusticpenn 6y ago
    and it gives a lot of false positives and false negatives...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
KKPMW 6y ago
I am trying this and I think I will move away from my over-configured "mutt" setup, just to use it. My only "suggestion" is to please keep it functional and simple.
awinter-py 6y ago
for any service whose core data is a 'collection of things', BYO prioritization & queueing makes a lot of sense too bad integration is really hard or this would be general
yodon 6y ago
Is the $25 license per user or per machine, and per year or perpetual?
toyg 6y ago
Don't sell an email client, there is a reason they are all dead: too much effort, too many edge cases (POP3, IMAP, Exchange, Gmail...), not enough margins. Instead, sell me a hack that can make Outlook look like that. You worry exclusively about the UI, Microsoft does the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Best case: you make a ton of money by selling to actual businesses (rather than annoying geeks and other weirdos who dare use uncommon clients); slightly-worse case: you sell it to MS.
- bjg 6y ago
  Yes please, I would buy this.
- tareqak 6y ago
  That actually makes me think that a lot of potential invention/innovation is locked away behind cumbersome user interfaces. Imagine if all email clients were split between models and controller + view. People who want to improve the UI would be able to do so without necessarily affecting people who like the way things currently are. Once a sufficiently effective and intuitive user interface comes along, then a user would be able switch to that at their own pace. If the model part of the email clients had an common API for manipulating said model, then the same controller+view code could be used across multiple email clients e.g. a Eudora interface to the latest version of Outlook for those who want it, and the same Eudora interface for Thunderbird. In addition, it would be possible to both have OS-specific versions of the controller+view if someone wanted a truly native experience, or have OS-agnostic versions using Java, QT, or Electron if someone wanted to ship something faster and/or have a common code-base for controller+view. NB. I might have confused MVC a little in my idea above.
  - joepie91_ 6y ago
    The model as you describe it wouldn't make a lot of sense. To simplify the description of what you're suggesting: it's to have the 'core' and 'UI' be separate. But if the cores of different applications are interchangeable anyway (which they need to be, to make this model work), then why would multiple cores exist in the first place? It could just be reduced to a single one, and there'd be little incentive to start a new one if you can't deviate from the API anyway. The closest real-world model to what you're describing, is an "implement once" public commons model; a shared commons of open-source / public domain libraries that implement a given responsibility or solution for a given problem, and that can then be used forever by everything, and that problem never needs solving again. For that to work, the implementations in question need to be highly granular, so that using them is a no-brainer and you don't pull in additional complexity that you don't need. An "e-mail client", for example, would then effectively just be a UI, and all the business logic would be provided externally by a collection of loosely-coupled libraries. Such a granular ecosystem, in turn, requires a dependency model where adding a dependency is (in and of itself) free and cannot cause dependency conflicts; otherwise people would start grouping complexity together again to reduce conflicts, as can be seen in the dependency ecosystems of many languages today. The only ecosystem that is currently at a point where it can support the "implement once" model, is that of JS, due to everything being highly modular and interoperable. Rust is also moving in that direction, but its ecosystem is nowhere near mature enough yet. Unfortunately, people are too busy complaining about meaningless dependency counts to understand what a highly-granular dependency model makes possible.
klaushardt 6y ago
Jut a Headsup, Chrome blocked the download and a virustotal report look like this: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2e78fed158e9e6857db7bfc6af37b3cc8abc2d7092fe63f64cb59e4ad10a3c22/detection https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2e78fed158e9e6857db7bfc6... 6 engines detected this file Do what you want with this information, cloud be false positive, cloud be something else idk.
freedomben 6y ago
Thank you for using a model that respects users' freedom! I happily pay for source-available software, sometimes even when I don't really need it that bad, because I like to support ethical software :-)
janwillemb 6y ago
My wife has a manual system for exactly the system in the screenshot, so I thought she would like it. "Nah, can't use it on my phone".
athenot 6y ago
This is one reasone that keeps me on Apple's Mail.app: open multiple windows for different mailboxes / folders / smart mailboxes and drag & drop at will between them. Keep a window for specific smart folders if there are special keywords / people you want to give priority. Tuck it in a corner of the screen without taking up lots of realestate. To be fair, Apple really screwed that workflow in 10.15 by disallowing customization of columns like they used to have since 10.0. But still, the multi-window organization is so much more flexible than the all-in-one-window setup. (For those concerned with tidiness, a window manager takes care of that problem.)
- beagle3 6y ago
  Thunderbird allows the same as far as I understand your wokflow (and has done for the nearly two decades it exists), if you want to look at alternatives (or occasionally have to use Windows or Linux)
KitDuncan 6y ago
If it has dark mode and good Linux support, I'll buy it. Will try out tomorrow.
satvikpendem 6y ago
Looks good. I follow this 16 year old on Twitter named Ethan, and he's built something similar: https://kanbanmail.app https://kanbanmail.app. I know of him due to his prevalence in the indie maker community, and he streams his development on Twitch sometimes.
brentis 6y ago
Love it, but calendar is so tied to Outlook. Please save us!
Legogris 6y ago
One thing that I think should be clarified regarding licensing: On the license page it says "Licenses are $25 during the beta period.". It is not clear if this means either: 1) During the beta period, a lifetime perpetual license is 25$ 2) License for the duration of the beta period costs 25$. After that you may or may not need to renew your license. This looks really interesting, but I think there are others who are hesitant to invest into something that may end up costing ongoing licensing fees that are yet to be determined.
- Fizzadar 6y ago
  You're absolutely right; I've expanded the copy on the license page. Any licenses purchased during the beta will last for the duration of beta and all of v1 updates.
andreyazimov 6y ago
Reminds me kanbanmail.app was in Hackers News 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576024
kev2908 6y ago
It seems like that the software doesn't have STARTTLS, so it doesn't work with Protonmail's Bridge :/
lucasgonze 6y ago
I installed this and used it for a day. This UX model is dramatically better for business mail than the standard mess of random folders. Kanmail itself is still pretty early stage. It's too raw for my own day to day usage, but I'll check back later. I hope it keeps going.

271 points by Fizzadar 6y ago

If there are people out there who are well invested into Gmail, then here's an alternative (https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-...) that does not require a separate client application. The initial concept is focused on desktop usage, but with a small modification it can be adapted to mobile-based working as well.

abendy 6y ago
For years I've used Gmail Filters to apply labels to specific "from" addresses. Takes a bit to set up as I have very long "from(@domain.com OR @domain2.com OR ...)" queries but ideally I'm also unsubscribing from newsletters etc. that I don't want. I also use multiple inboxes as well. First, "Starred" (different colored stars means different things to me and this strategy is used consistently across multiple platforms inc macOS labels, Trello etc.), then "Alerts" (critical emails from various systems), then "Important and Unread", then everything else. Most emails are not "important" and I do actively unsubscribe so the method is manageable for me. The last thing I need is my email inbox to be a giant todo list. Most important are tech/work related, current projects, finance/business. I try not to sign up for anything that I need to read, newsletters etc. That's what RSS is for. Email is for quick actionable item and some communication.
- j45 6y ago
  This approach works well, until you have to click on a star in each mail 4 or 5 times to get it to turn into a purple star, etc.
  - abendy 6y ago
    I star a handful of emails max. each day. Not laborious at all considering the work load offloaded to Gmail's filters and I use a red, orange, yellow, & green star system.
anthonybullard 6y ago
When I was at Google, Tim Sneath taught this same workflow to the whole team. It was the only way to handle the Google scale email firehose. Now that I'm in an Outlook shop, been looking for a way to replicate it.
stephen 6y ago
Amazing. If someone from Slack is on this thread, you can please implement the todo/waiting reply/etc. tagging/view-by-tag UX shown in the ^ post?
- avel 6y ago
  You can already do an inbox-zero-like workflow in slack. In Prefereneces -> Sidebar set slack to only show "Unreads and starred conversations". This reduces the list of channels to these two things. (Edit: it might be a good idea to star all conversations that need followup, first). Muted channels (which I make use of a lot) will still not trigger notifications, but now you'll know that, if it appears in the sidebar, there are unreads there. I star any conversations that comes up and needs followups or actions. When I'm done with it, I unstar it and it goes away. This has worked wonders for me and I highly suggest the same workflow to everyone. Note that after the latest Slack update, it should be possible to make use of the groups feature and use them together with the workflow above. This way you can have multiple statuses like TODO, awaiting reply and delegated, like in the parent article, rather than a single set of starred conversations. So far I haven't felt the need for this personally. Oh and one more thing. In Preferences -> messages and media set it to "Compact", it will declutter the UI a bit.
  - aantix 6y ago
    I like the workflow. It seems reactionary. I always considered the advantage of real-time chat is that it was more conducive to socializing. To injecting a bit of your personality. Is it antisocial to only respond to that which is asked?
    - kchr 6y ago
      Hiding the list of conversations doesn't medan you have to keep away from them. You can still jump to windows and write to people using the search bars and commands! :-)
errnoh 6y ago
Decided to try this out. The instructions are mostly up-to-date, main thing that has changed seems to be that the multiple inboxes option is now under Settings->Inbox->Inbox type->Multiple Inboxes
skrebbel 6y ago
I've been using it for years but I can't figure out how to make it work on mobile. Gmail mobile (web and app) simply doesn't have those various icons for stars. What's that small modification?
- usrme 6y ago
  Use labels instead of those icons. If you scroll to the very bottom of the link I provided, then it's mentioned there.

ThePhysicist 6y ago

That look super slick, congrats on launching it! It still looks a bit "noisy" to me, maybe you can reduce the information density a little as to me it seems a bit overwhelming. Super useful idea though and surely something that can be a success!

Fizzadar 6y ago
Thank you! Agreed re:noisy-ness there's a lot going on currently; will be looking into tweaking that!

ppadron 6y ago

this looks amazing, will try it out. having the option show messages from all accounts at once is a blessing for me.

yodon 6y ago
It amazes me that Outlook mobile will let me see all my email from all my accounts in one list but Outlook desktop will not.

mmPzf 6y ago

I'm a bit confused by the "open source but not free" statement in the readme. How common is it to refer to software with public source code as "open source"? I always thought the "open source" label applied only to those licenses officially certified as open source.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
Yes, it's a misuse of the term "open source". It should be described as "source-available" [0], not "open source". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
- z3t4 6y ago
  Many popular "open source" projects are also not free...
  - mmPzf 6y ago
    Can you name some examples? According to the internet for most practical purposes the terms "open source" and "free software" refer to the same set of licenses [0] [0]: https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-software https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-sof...
    - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
      Asperite is open source and not free.
      - orangeshark 6y ago
        Aseprite is not Free and Open Source software. It is source available though.
    - Beaver117 6y ago
      Elasticsearch

tjwds 6y ago

Very cool! It looks like the primary focus here is displaying the messages in multiple folders at the same time; I like the message opens where it has space to open. The account management settings page mentions needing an application password for Gmail — you'll also need one to add a Fastmail account (it looks like it retrieves through IMAP and sends through SMTP). When I added an account, the account's existing folders weren't displayed to me anywhere (I was expecting the sidebar), but it looks like you can add a column for an existing folder and it'll just work. It also looks like the action of dragging a message from one column to another removes it from one folder and adds it to another, which makes sense for a kanban board, but might get a little weird with Fastmail's labels mode, where a message can exist in multiple folders! (https://beta.fastmail.com/help/receive/labels-beta.html https://beta.fastmail.com/help/receive/labels-beta.html)

Fizzadar 6y ago
Thank you for the feedback, this is incredibly helpful! - Regarding the new account message I shall update this to point at the providers page (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/81 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/81) - I like the idea of auto populating sidebar folders (without causing cluter, one to investigate) (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/82 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/82) - Originally Kanmail did copy emails between folders/labels (matching Gmail) but moving emails is more IMAP friendly in general. However, perhaps an option to copy is the best solution here, giving the end user the choice (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/83 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/83)

lettergram 6y ago

I actually setup something similar years ago with a gmail add-on. Was pretty intuitive and liked it. It would be advantageous to add additional features over this such as: 1. Adding points or estimated workloads to emails. 2. Adding notes to emails 3. Snooze emails (which would drop their priority on the board, but stay in the same lane until post snooze). 4. Highlight who is in the discussion thread. 5. Rules for lanes of work (for instance potentially emails from boss should go straight to “in progress”)

Fizzadar 6y ago
Thank you for the feedback, these are some really interesting ideas :) 1/2/3: It could be possible to implement points/notes/snoozes by using (abusing?) IMAP folders to store such information. Ideally such information would live on the server-side such that it would sync between devices (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/84 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/84 / https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/85 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/85). 4: Great idea, long threads make this really hard to see currently! (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/86 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/86) 5: Currently possible using Gmail filters, but not part of the client itself of course. Would be really interesting to implement this! (https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/87 https://github.com/Oxygem/Kanmail/issues/87)

strogonoff 6y ago

Kanmail is built using pywebview, which is an interesting alternative to Electron. Lighter distributions thanks to using respective OS’s native web view.

tmikaeld 6y ago

Would love it if any client would support grouping all messages per senders unique email and topic, sorted by date. The result is almost like a conversation. It makes it easier to see each topic as well. So far, I've only seen "Unibox" client on MacOS do this. (Not updates since 2018)

medecau 6y ago
I think the upcoming hey.com service is going to do something similar to that.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  Huh, very interesting. Seems to be created by Basecamp, so will certainly be reliable.

reacharavindh 6y ago

I have been wanting an email client where I can simply drag and drop emails as a TO-DO Kanban board. I will definitely give this a try.

lukevp 6y ago

This looks great! I’ll give it a try. Congrats on launching! Email is a great communication mechanism, but as a manager, it’s so hard to corral the process of following up on emails that take many days for people to do. It would be awesome if each column could have a suspended area at the bottom and I could set due dates and they would sort into that separate section until they are due.

howmayiannoyyou 6y ago

If this were solely a Gmail extension I would be 100% in and pay about $25/month.

krembo 6y ago
Checkout 2 alternatives implemented as Chrome extensions: * https://yanado.com/ https://yanado.com/ * https://www.sortd.com/ https://www.sortd.com/
freediver 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what ties you to Gmail?

mohammedhdotio 6y ago

I've been doing Thunderbird with quick folder extension to achieve near the same functionality however in Tabbed view. nonetheless a great idea. will test it soon.

choeger 6y ago

The package.json in that repository says "MIT". How does that work with the propietary license agreement? I also wonder if the author has any way to prevent copyleft code entering their project. What would be a nuisance for a free software project could potentially kill a commercial one like this. I do not mean this as a comment against copyleft or this particular project, I am really interested to know if there is a Semi-Automatic license scanner.

Fizzadar 6y ago
Thank you for spotting this will update the package.json license field now. As for external code this is somewhat manual - yarn has a really helpful `yarn licenses` (https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/licenses https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/licenses) which removes a lot of the pain for the JS side!
erjiang 6y ago
License scanning is a big deal for enterprise, especially the ones deeply afraid of any "GPL infection". Black Duck is one such vendor of license scanning software.[0] [0] https://www.blackducksoftware.com/ https://www.blackducksoftware.com/
- rusticpenn 6y ago
  and it gives a lot of false positives and false negatives...

deleted 6y ago

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KKPMW 6y ago

I am trying this and I think I will move away from my over-configured "mutt" setup, just to use it. My only "suggestion" is to please keep it functional and simple.

awinter-py 6y ago

for any service whose core data is a 'collection of things', BYO prioritization & queueing makes a lot of sense too bad integration is really hard or this would be general

yodon 6y ago

Is the $25 license per user or per machine, and per year or perpetual?

toyg 6y ago

Don't sell an email client, there is a reason they are all dead: too much effort, too many edge cases (POP3, IMAP, Exchange, Gmail...), not enough margins. Instead, sell me a hack that can make Outlook look like that. You worry exclusively about the UI, Microsoft does the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Best case: you make a ton of money by selling to actual businesses (rather than annoying geeks and other weirdos who dare use uncommon clients); slightly-worse case: you sell it to MS.

bjg 6y ago
Yes please, I would buy this.
tareqak 6y ago
That actually makes me think that a lot of potential invention/innovation is locked away behind cumbersome user interfaces. Imagine if all email clients were split between models and controller + view. People who want to improve the UI would be able to do so without necessarily affecting people who like the way things currently are. Once a sufficiently effective and intuitive user interface comes along, then a user would be able switch to that at their own pace. If the model part of the email clients had an common API for manipulating said model, then the same controller+view code could be used across multiple email clients e.g. a Eudora interface to the latest version of Outlook for those who want it, and the same Eudora interface for Thunderbird. In addition, it would be possible to both have OS-specific versions of the controller+view if someone wanted a truly native experience, or have OS-agnostic versions using Java, QT, or Electron if someone wanted to ship something faster and/or have a common code-base for controller+view. NB. I might have confused MVC a little in my idea above.
- joepie91_ 6y ago
  The model as you describe it wouldn't make a lot of sense. To simplify the description of what you're suggesting: it's to have the 'core' and 'UI' be separate. But if the cores of different applications are interchangeable anyway (which they need to be, to make this model work), then why would multiple cores exist in the first place? It could just be reduced to a single one, and there'd be little incentive to start a new one if you can't deviate from the API anyway. The closest real-world model to what you're describing, is an "implement once" public commons model; a shared commons of open-source / public domain libraries that implement a given responsibility or solution for a given problem, and that can then be used forever by everything, and that problem never needs solving again. For that to work, the implementations in question need to be highly granular, so that using them is a no-brainer and you don't pull in additional complexity that you don't need. An "e-mail client", for example, would then effectively just be a UI, and all the business logic would be provided externally by a collection of loosely-coupled libraries. Such a granular ecosystem, in turn, requires a dependency model where adding a dependency is (in and of itself) free and cannot cause dependency conflicts; otherwise people would start grouping complexity together again to reduce conflicts, as can be seen in the dependency ecosystems of many languages today. The only ecosystem that is currently at a point where it can support the "implement once" model, is that of JS, due to everything being highly modular and interoperable. Rust is also moving in that direction, but its ecosystem is nowhere near mature enough yet. Unfortunately, people are too busy complaining about meaningless dependency counts to understand what a highly-granular dependency model makes possible.

klaushardt 6y ago

Jut a Headsup, Chrome blocked the download and a virustotal report look like this: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2e78fed158e9e6857db7bfc6af37b3cc8abc2d7092fe63f64cb59e4ad10a3c22/detection https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2e78fed158e9e6857db7bfc6... 6 engines detected this file Do what you want with this information, cloud be false positive, cloud be something else idk.

freedomben 6y ago

Thank you for using a model that respects users' freedom! I happily pay for source-available software, sometimes even when I don't really need it that bad, because I like to support ethical software :-)

janwillemb 6y ago

My wife has a manual system for exactly the system in the screenshot, so I thought she would like it. "Nah, can't use it on my phone".

athenot 6y ago

This is one reasone that keeps me on Apple's Mail.app: open multiple windows for different mailboxes / folders / smart mailboxes and drag & drop at will between them. Keep a window for specific smart folders if there are special keywords / people you want to give priority. Tuck it in a corner of the screen without taking up lots of realestate. To be fair, Apple really screwed that workflow in 10.15 by disallowing customization of columns like they used to have since 10.0. But still, the multi-window organization is so much more flexible than the all-in-one-window setup. (For those concerned with tidiness, a window manager takes care of that problem.)

beagle3 6y ago
Thunderbird allows the same as far as I understand your wokflow (and has done for the nearly two decades it exists), if you want to look at alternatives (or occasionally have to use Windows or Linux)

KitDuncan 6y ago

If it has dark mode and good Linux support, I'll buy it. Will try out tomorrow.

satvikpendem 6y ago

Looks good. I follow this 16 year old on Twitter named Ethan, and he's built something similar: https://kanbanmail.app https://kanbanmail.app. I know of him due to his prevalence in the indie maker community, and he streams his development on Twitch sometimes.

brentis 6y ago

Love it, but calendar is so tied to Outlook. Please save us!

Legogris 6y ago

One thing that I think should be clarified regarding licensing: On the license page it says "Licenses are $25 during the beta period.". It is not clear if this means either: 1) During the beta period, a lifetime perpetual license is 25$ 2) License for the duration of the beta period costs 25$. After that you may or may not need to renew your license. This looks really interesting, but I think there are others who are hesitant to invest into something that may end up costing ongoing licensing fees that are yet to be determined.

Fizzadar 6y ago
You're absolutely right; I've expanded the copy on the license page. Any licenses purchased during the beta will last for the duration of beta and all of v1 updates.

andreyazimov 6y ago

Reminds me kanbanmail.app was in Hackers News 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17576024

kev2908 6y ago

It seems like that the software doesn't have STARTTLS, so it doesn't work with Protonmail's Bridge :/

lucasgonze 6y ago

I installed this and used it for a day. This UX model is dramatically better for business mail than the standard mess of random folders. Kanmail itself is still pretty early stage. It's too raw for my own day to day usage, but I'll check back later. I hope it keeps going.