7 ms·

Aussies' fix for 'stagnated' email

232 points by michaelneale 15y ago

cellularmitosis 15y ago
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
- ootachi 15y ago
  Technologies that are no longer growing tend to result in cost-cutting, leading to engineers in the US and Europe getting laid off for offshoring. So "if it's not growing, it's dead" is actually a rather good approximation of the status quo.
- Groxx 15y ago
  'Dead' doesn't exist in the article, it's a (pointless) bit of editorializing by the submitter. The article revolves around email having stagnated, which pretty nicely fits the "no longer growing" part.
- michaelneale 15y ago
  yeah editors removed that (I shouldn't have added it).
Volpe 15y ago
Can we put the actual url in [1] Looks very inspired by by Sparrow.app [2](OS X mail application). Though they have improved on the UI in some aspects. Great that people are still trying to make email better. [1] http://fluent.io http://fluent.io [2] http://sparrowmailapp.com/ http://sparrowmailapp.com/
- tedmiston 15y ago
  I use Sparrow and I agree. It manages to make communication by email so lightweight and fun again, but it lacks the stream that Fluent has. I'm very excited to explore Fluent as well.
- Maro 15y ago
  I actually purchased Sparrow, but I don't use it. It was slow and had some UX quirks/bugs. For a time I fired it up every once in a while as an email-backup solution, but I got lazy so I don't even do that now.
  - Maro 15y ago
    Eg. I usually have Gmail open in other browsers in Windows even if I run Sparrow on the Mac, and it takes several minutes for Sparrow to notice that a message has already been read, which is super annoying.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
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).
jacques_chester 15y ago
"we sort of present you with the information that you need to immediately action on it." Really? Really? I expect better from my fellow Australians, even if they are Sydney-siders.
- dhanji 15y ago
  Fwiw, that's the SMH reporter misquoting us from an in-person interview. However, we'll try to live up to Australian standards better in the future =)
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    Then I retract my slur on Sydney and all her works. Except for the journalists. (What did you actually say, in your recollection?)
    - BenGrubb 15y ago
      FWIW, it was the original quote http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26309/action.m4a http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26309/action.m4a Regards, Ben Grubb (the journalist)
      - jacques_chester 15y ago
        I want to give you a free pass, really, but my irrational hatred of journalists in general is a matter of public record. I'm just too damn lazy to start a whitelist, I hope you can forgive me.
      - adaml_623 15y ago
        Yep. Audio matches written quote. Kudos Ben on your quick rebuttal of the misquote claim. And for an article full of links to all the companies and technologies you're writing about.
- seclorum 15y ago
  As an Australian (who hasn't lived there for decades) nothing gives me a case of cultural-cringe more than these sorts of articles from the Australian tech scene, which appear to be intended solely to pitch the "Australian"-ness of the individuals involved to the world. Did they really have to editorialize and verb 'action' to make you sound cool? I think not. But, we have to 'sell the cool', right, SMH? I think this was a fail - it really makes you appear idiotic to say things like "action that email". Cringe++. Besides that tender point, the idea of presenting ones email as a stream is an interesting - but not new - idea. I'd be rather more happy to see this idea, which in my opinion ought to be implemented as a GUI control for all mail clients possible, evolve into Mail.app and other mail clients.
ballard 15y ago
FlowDock plus some gadgets would be workflow awesomeness.
chrislloyd 15y ago
Don't use the Konami code in the app if you want to get anything done this evening! Incredibly slick UI.
firefoxman1 15y ago
Mozilla Raindrop aimed to reinvent email too. I was so excited for it to launch, but they discontinued it.
kumarm 15y ago
Great to see that someone is still innovating on EMail. GMail was last major +ve change that happened to EMail and its been too long.
sendos 15y ago
Great interface! A big improvement over Gmail and anything else out there that I'm aware of.
iamleppert 15y ago
What an over-engineered, proprietary interface-ey mess. But at least people are still plugging away.
- firefoxman1 15y ago
  Anyone ever use Opera mail? Perfect interface and features. I guess it's just overlooked because, you know, it's Opera :(
  - copper 15y ago
    If I remember correctly, I (reluctantly) had to switch to t-bird back in the day because it didn't do STARTTLS+IMAP. It was perfect, otherwise. I'm yet to see a faster way to search through mail.
twakefield 15y ago
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.
- nash 15y ago
  I take it you never used mutt? That is how you rip through thousands of emails in insanely short times. Much MUCH faster then gmail.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Marginally faster. There's only so fast you can make email because you still need to comprehend it. And BTW, comprehension + shortcuts is the killer feature of Gmail. Having a nice GUI facilitates comprehension which allows you to act faster. There are many reasons why an individual might prefer mutt, but "Much MUCH faster than gmail" is overstating the case quite a bit.
ghayes 15y ago
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). 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. [1] http://zeromail.com/ http://zeromail.com/
- jacalata 15y ago
  Funny, the bit in the article where they mentioned zeromail and talked to the zeromail founders also reminded me of zeromail.
citricsquid 15y ago
> "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," 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.
- tsunamifury 15y ago
  I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare mish-mash of to-do list, calendar, notes, and assorted hate mail from their bosses. In short, email is fucking awful and the bane of my existence. At one point I was getting north of 200 emails a day from people demanding meetings, todos, updates, and pieces of information. Please someone... reinvent it!
  - zoul 15y ago
    Sounds like a social/process problem, not a technical one. Bad company can fuck up any technology, no matter how brilliant.
  - there 15y ago
    I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare So, exactly the people that any new e-mail solution won't be able to help because they're locked into a Lotus Notes/Exchange server with a bunch of backend integration and a proprietary client.
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    Email is not the bane of your existence, people using a communication platform to do things other than communicate is the bane of your existence. Your problem could be solved quite easily with changes to policy (which is just as likely to happen as your company moving away from email).
  - BillPosters 15y ago
    Nobody gets 200 emails per day all directly asking for something. If you do, as already said, that's a process and staffing issue, not email's fault. The good thing about the old subject line of an email is that you usually can tell whether it's something you need to look at now or save for later, move to another folder, or delete. You can also quickly see whether you are the main target or just CC'd. Speed reading can also assist in processing email. Sometimes you just know whether you need to read something thoroughly, or can glance over.
Tawheed 15y ago
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.
firefoxman1 15y ago
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. The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more is such a great time-saving feature.
- aymeric 15y ago
  You are not the only one blown away by this. This story is on the first spot of HN. Great UI, I love the attention they paid to some details.
tga 15y ago
My new take on email: leave it alone and go fix something that's actually broken. 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. 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.
prtamil 15y ago
yeah pretty much bored after seeing gmail interface. some innovation required. its good.
michaelneale 15y ago
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?)
- underwater 15y ago
  Editors can (and do) change the title to avoid editorializing: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
  - michaelneale 15y ago
    Thanks - that explains it. Although I object to just using the headline of the page (as I think the ex-wave is more relevant than the 'aussies' bit - but I guess there is novelty for the rest of the world).
michaelneale 15y ago
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?)
trentmb 15y ago
At least they left the vowels in the name.
- __jochen__ 15y ago
  Over beers, "flnt" seemed good... but sanity prevailed.
- MortenK 15y ago
  And it isn't fluent.ly either!
mhansen 15y ago
Very smooth interface, from what I can see. FYI on demo.fluent.io I'm getting HTTP 400 error trying to connect to the websocket.
mhansen 15y ago
Very smooth interface, from what I can see. FYI on demo.fluent.io I'm getting HTTP 400 trying to connect to the websocket.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
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. 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. 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. 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). 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). 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). 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... 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? 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... 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origi... 2. http://dot-bit.org/ http://dot-bit.org/ 3. ddg-fu failing me atm, will add this later.
- steve-howard 15y ago
retrogradeorbit 15y ago
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.
liuhenry 15y ago
Congrats to Fluent! Great design and a slick UI. 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. I'm working on Glider (http://glider.io http://glider.io), 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. We did a soft launch on HN a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917), and would love to know what you guys think. Good luck as well to the Fluent team!
- troels 15y ago
  A word of advise: Asking me to give you access to my email account is a very big leap of trust. I can't see what your product does without taking that leap - so I don't.
  - liuhenry 15y ago
    You're completely right, and my apologies. We're not quite ready to take on more users at the moment - to clarify, the signup on the homepage doesn't give us access to your account, it simply registers your interest. We've been hard at work on the product, so we held off on working on the landing page, but we absolutely will have a demo along with more information in the near future.
  - __jochen__ 15y ago
    I quite agree that it takes trust. We do have a demo up for a safe hands-on with the product (demo.fluent.io). We certainly take your privacy seriously. Here's a bit more on that: http://fluent.io/privacy.html http://fluent.io/privacy.html
    - jmarbach 15y ago
johnx123-up 15y ago
Ah, title got changed from "Ex-Google Wave engineers new take on Email (email is not dead yet)" to "Aussies' fix for 'stagnated' email"
johnx123-up 15y ago
Technology stack, please? Scala?
- chrisbroadfoot 15y ago
  I'm guessing Java.
  - jdefarge 15y ago
    Java, Guice, jQuery, and JAX-RS, at least. Dhanji has been deeply involved on those technologies for a long time.
jtchang 15y ago
Is e-mail that freaking broken for everyone? 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. I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails me something akin to a personal letter.
- BillPosters 15y ago
  Nope. Email not broken for me. I like it how it is because filters and sensible organising of inboxes is not hard. Not interested in email streams at all. I'd prefer to keep streams for the kind of information that doesn't require action or response frequently per item. Emails often require action or attention, and it's far better they exist as subject line items in a date-ordered list for easy retrieval, sorting and archiving all at once.
  - mdpye 15y ago
    But I'd like to take my stream like conversations back to a simple, open, distributed (in the sense of server control) protocol like SMTP and away from Facebook Messenger (for example). It's just a bit of message passing, why should email NOT also handle multiple participants and almost-real-time conversations well? Twitter is a different beast, it's a public stream, but what does FB messenger offer over email, other than an improved user experience? (for some value of improved...)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bobowzki 15y ago
"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"." Google Wave anyone?
waseemsadiq 15y ago
I already built this back in 2009 http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-communications-stream-to-rule-them-all/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-commun... And here is the desktop client which is now open-source: http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg 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. There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them. 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. Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work. The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com
- GnomeChomsky 15y ago
  Did you even read the article, or did you just come here to toot your own horn? All of your "advice" is exactly addressed by Fluent, e.g. built on top of Gmail, better search, better inbox navigation, and better attachment handling. I have no idea how successful Fluent will be at all those things, but it's just peculiar when a site says "we're tackling problems x, y, and z" and you come along and say, "your ideas suck, try addressing problems x, y, and z instead."
  - waseemsadiq 15y ago
    Lol @ thinking that IMAP and gmail are the same thing Having spent the last 3 years of my life tackling this problem I would say I am pretty qualified to say this solution sucks. And they are totally not solving the problems I mentioned, they are building a new mail client. Which tends to be a completely different thing. Anyways just my 0.02$
- waseemsadiq 15y ago
  Oh and I forgot to mention this is horribly expensive to scale. We calculated that it cost us about 1.20 euro do keep this up per user per month. And mind you these costs were primarily network bound so it doesn't matter if you have faster hardware. There are some optimization techniques you can do to bring this down (for example use imap push) but with gmail you are looking at about 2K connections per IP, you do the math. Actually you can do this (and we are doing this through partners) on the cheap but the experience you can provide will not be appealing unless it is an add-on experience on an existing product.
mbesto 15y ago
E-mail is stagnated not because of technologic restrictions. Beautiful UI though! This is a people problem, not a technology one. Sorry, just don't see it 'fixing' a problem.
badboy 15y ago
Wow, the interface is really nice. But I don't think it would work for my daily mail use. I'm too familiar with my mutt setup.
lurchpop 15y ago
The only thing I feel is broken about [web-based] email right now is that it can so easily be snooped on.
- eru 15y ago
  By the email provider or by third parties? https fixes the first part. You can't do much about the second in web-based email.
marknadal 15y ago
Slick interface and the instant search makes me want to use the product. 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.
antonyh 15y ago
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. 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.
meiji 15y ago
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. 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
pghimire 15y ago
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.
mirsadm 15y ago
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.
bitwize 15y ago
Soooo, the solution to stagnating email... is to make it look like Facebook. Not what I'd call "fair dinkum", but...

232 points by michaelneale 15y ago

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

ootachi 15y ago
Technologies that are no longer growing tend to result in cost-cutting, leading to engineers in the US and Europe getting laid off for offshoring. So "if it's not growing, it's dead" is actually a rather good approximation of the status quo.
Groxx 15y ago
'Dead' doesn't exist in the article, it's a (pointless) bit of editorializing by the submitter. The article revolves around email having stagnated, which pretty nicely fits the "no longer growing" part.
michaelneale 15y ago
yeah editors removed that (I shouldn't have added it).

Volpe 15y ago

Can we put the actual url in [1] Looks very inspired by by Sparrow.app [2](OS X mail application). Though they have improved on the UI in some aspects. Great that people are still trying to make email better. [1] http://fluent.io http://fluent.io [2] http://sparrowmailapp.com/ http://sparrowmailapp.com/

tedmiston 15y ago
I use Sparrow and I agree. It manages to make communication by email so lightweight and fun again, but it lacks the stream that Fluent has. I'm very excited to explore Fluent as well.
Maro 15y ago
I actually purchased Sparrow, but I don't use it. It was slow and had some UX quirks/bugs. For a time I fired it up every once in a while as an email-backup solution, but I got lazy so I don't even do that now.
- Maro 15y ago
  Eg. I usually have Gmail open in other browsers in Windows even if I run Sparrow on the Mac, and it takes several minutes for Sparrow to notice that a message has already been read, which is super annoying.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

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).

jacques_chester 15y ago

"we sort of present you with the information that you need to immediately action on it." Really? Really? I expect better from my fellow Australians, even if they are Sydney-siders.

dhanji 15y ago
Fwiw, that's the SMH reporter misquoting us from an in-person interview. However, we'll try to live up to Australian standards better in the future =)
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  Then I retract my slur on Sydney and all her works. Except for the journalists. (What did you actually say, in your recollection?)
  - BenGrubb 15y ago
    FWIW, it was the original quote http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26309/action.m4a http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26309/action.m4a Regards, Ben Grubb (the journalist)
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      I want to give you a free pass, really, but my irrational hatred of journalists in general is a matter of public record. I'm just too damn lazy to start a whitelist, I hope you can forgive me.
    - adaml_623 15y ago
      Yep. Audio matches written quote. Kudos Ben on your quick rebuttal of the misquote claim. And for an article full of links to all the companies and technologies you're writing about.
seclorum 15y ago
As an Australian (who hasn't lived there for decades) nothing gives me a case of cultural-cringe more than these sorts of articles from the Australian tech scene, which appear to be intended solely to pitch the "Australian"-ness of the individuals involved to the world. Did they really have to editorialize and verb 'action' to make you sound cool? I think not. But, we have to 'sell the cool', right, SMH? I think this was a fail - it really makes you appear idiotic to say things like "action that email". Cringe++. Besides that tender point, the idea of presenting ones email as a stream is an interesting - but not new - idea. I'd be rather more happy to see this idea, which in my opinion ought to be implemented as a GUI control for all mail clients possible, evolve into Mail.app and other mail clients.

ballard 15y ago

FlowDock plus some gadgets would be workflow awesomeness.

chrislloyd 15y ago

Don't use the Konami code in the app if you want to get anything done this evening! Incredibly slick UI.

firefoxman1 15y ago

Mozilla Raindrop aimed to reinvent email too. I was so excited for it to launch, but they discontinued it.

kumarm 15y ago

Great to see that someone is still innovating on EMail. GMail was last major +ve change that happened to EMail and its been too long.

sendos 15y ago

Great interface! A big improvement over Gmail and anything else out there that I'm aware of.

iamleppert 15y ago

What an over-engineered, proprietary interface-ey mess. But at least people are still plugging away.

firefoxman1 15y ago
Anyone ever use Opera mail? Perfect interface and features. I guess it's just overlooked because, you know, it's Opera :(
- copper 15y ago
  If I remember correctly, I (reluctantly) had to switch to t-bird back in the day because it didn't do STARTTLS+IMAP. It was perfect, otherwise. I'm yet to see a faster way to search through mail.

twakefield 15y ago

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.

nash 15y ago
I take it you never used mutt? That is how you rip through thousands of emails in insanely short times. Much MUCH faster then gmail.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Marginally faster. There's only so fast you can make email because you still need to comprehend it. And BTW, comprehension + shortcuts is the killer feature of Gmail. Having a nice GUI facilitates comprehension which allows you to act faster. There are many reasons why an individual might prefer mutt, but "Much MUCH faster than gmail" is overstating the case quite a bit.

ghayes 15y ago

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). 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. [1] http://zeromail.com/ http://zeromail.com/

jacalata 15y ago
Funny, the bit in the article where they mentioned zeromail and talked to the zeromail founders also reminded me of zeromail.

citricsquid 15y ago

> "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," 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.

tsunamifury 15y ago
I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare mish-mash of to-do list, calendar, notes, and assorted hate mail from their bosses. In short, email is fucking awful and the bane of my existence. At one point I was getting north of 200 emails a day from people demanding meetings, todos, updates, and pieces of information. Please someone... reinvent it!
- zoul 15y ago
  Sounds like a social/process problem, not a technical one. Bad company can fuck up any technology, no matter how brilliant.
- there 15y ago
  I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare So, exactly the people that any new e-mail solution won't be able to help because they're locked into a Lotus Notes/Exchange server with a bunch of backend integration and a proprietary client.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  Email is not the bane of your existence, people using a communication platform to do things other than communicate is the bane of your existence. Your problem could be solved quite easily with changes to policy (which is just as likely to happen as your company moving away from email).
- BillPosters 15y ago
  Nobody gets 200 emails per day all directly asking for something. If you do, as already said, that's a process and staffing issue, not email's fault. The good thing about the old subject line of an email is that you usually can tell whether it's something you need to look at now or save for later, move to another folder, or delete. You can also quickly see whether you are the main target or just CC'd. Speed reading can also assist in processing email. Sometimes you just know whether you need to read something thoroughly, or can glance over.

Tawheed 15y ago

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.

firefoxman1 15y ago

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. The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more is such a great time-saving feature.

aymeric 15y ago
You are not the only one blown away by this. This story is on the first spot of HN. Great UI, I love the attention they paid to some details.

tga 15y ago

My new take on email: leave it alone and go fix something that's actually broken. 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. 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.

prtamil 15y ago

yeah pretty much bored after seeing gmail interface. some innovation required. its good.

michaelneale 15y ago

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?)

underwater 15y ago
Editors can (and do) change the title to avoid editorializing: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- michaelneale 15y ago
  Thanks - that explains it. Although I object to just using the headline of the page (as I think the ex-wave is more relevant than the 'aussies' bit - but I guess there is novelty for the rest of the world).

michaelneale 15y ago

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?)

trentmb 15y ago

At least they left the vowels in the name.

__jochen__ 15y ago
Over beers, "flnt" seemed good... but sanity prevailed.
MortenK 15y ago
And it isn't fluent.ly either!

mhansen 15y ago

Very smooth interface, from what I can see. FYI on demo.fluent.io I'm getting HTTP 400 error trying to connect to the websocket.

mhansen 15y ago

Very smooth interface, from what I can see. FYI on demo.fluent.io I'm getting HTTP 400 trying to connect to the websocket.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

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. 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. 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. 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). 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). 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). 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... 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? 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... 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origi... 2. http://dot-bit.org/ http://dot-bit.org/ 3. ddg-fu failing me atm, will add this later.

steve-howard 15y ago

retrogradeorbit 15y ago

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.

liuhenry 15y ago

Congrats to Fluent! Great design and a slick UI. 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. I'm working on Glider (http://glider.io http://glider.io), 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. We did a soft launch on HN a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917), and would love to know what you guys think. Good luck as well to the Fluent team!

troels 15y ago
A word of advise: Asking me to give you access to my email account is a very big leap of trust. I can't see what your product does without taking that leap - so I don't.
- liuhenry 15y ago
  You're completely right, and my apologies. We're not quite ready to take on more users at the moment - to clarify, the signup on the homepage doesn't give us access to your account, it simply registers your interest. We've been hard at work on the product, so we held off on working on the landing page, but we absolutely will have a demo along with more information in the near future.
- __jochen__ 15y ago
  I quite agree that it takes trust. We do have a demo up for a safe hands-on with the product (demo.fluent.io). We certainly take your privacy seriously. Here's a bit more on that: http://fluent.io/privacy.html http://fluent.io/privacy.html
  - jmarbach 15y ago

johnx123-up 15y ago

Ah, title got changed from "Ex-Google Wave engineers new take on Email (email is not dead yet)" to "Aussies' fix for 'stagnated' email"

johnx123-up 15y ago

Technology stack, please? Scala?

chrisbroadfoot 15y ago
I'm guessing Java.
- jdefarge 15y ago
  Java, Guice, jQuery, and JAX-RS, at least. Dhanji has been deeply involved on those technologies for a long time.

jtchang 15y ago

Is e-mail that freaking broken for everyone? 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. I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails me something akin to a personal letter.

BillPosters 15y ago
Nope. Email not broken for me. I like it how it is because filters and sensible organising of inboxes is not hard. Not interested in email streams at all. I'd prefer to keep streams for the kind of information that doesn't require action or response frequently per item. Emails often require action or attention, and it's far better they exist as subject line items in a date-ordered list for easy retrieval, sorting and archiving all at once.
- mdpye 15y ago
  But I'd like to take my stream like conversations back to a simple, open, distributed (in the sense of server control) protocol like SMTP and away from Facebook Messenger (for example). It's just a bit of message passing, why should email NOT also handle multiple participants and almost-real-time conversations well? Twitter is a different beast, it's a public stream, but what does FB messenger offer over email, other than an improved user experience? (for some value of improved...)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

bobowzki 15y ago

"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"." Google Wave anyone?

waseemsadiq 15y ago

I already built this back in 2009 http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-communications-stream-to-rule-them-all/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-commun... And here is the desktop client which is now open-source: http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg 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. There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them. 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. Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work. The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com

GnomeChomsky 15y ago
Did you even read the article, or did you just come here to toot your own horn? All of your "advice" is exactly addressed by Fluent, e.g. built on top of Gmail, better search, better inbox navigation, and better attachment handling. I have no idea how successful Fluent will be at all those things, but it's just peculiar when a site says "we're tackling problems x, y, and z" and you come along and say, "your ideas suck, try addressing problems x, y, and z instead."
- waseemsadiq 15y ago
  Lol @ thinking that IMAP and gmail are the same thing Having spent the last 3 years of my life tackling this problem I would say I am pretty qualified to say this solution sucks. And they are totally not solving the problems I mentioned, they are building a new mail client. Which tends to be a completely different thing. Anyways just my 0.02$
waseemsadiq 15y ago
Oh and I forgot to mention this is horribly expensive to scale. We calculated that it cost us about 1.20 euro do keep this up per user per month. And mind you these costs were primarily network bound so it doesn't matter if you have faster hardware. There are some optimization techniques you can do to bring this down (for example use imap push) but with gmail you are looking at about 2K connections per IP, you do the math. Actually you can do this (and we are doing this through partners) on the cheap but the experience you can provide will not be appealing unless it is an add-on experience on an existing product.

mbesto 15y ago

E-mail is stagnated not because of technologic restrictions. Beautiful UI though! This is a people problem, not a technology one. Sorry, just don't see it 'fixing' a problem.

badboy 15y ago

Wow, the interface is really nice. But I don't think it would work for my daily mail use. I'm too familiar with my mutt setup.

lurchpop 15y ago

The only thing I feel is broken about [web-based] email right now is that it can so easily be snooped on.

eru 15y ago
By the email provider or by third parties? https fixes the first part. You can't do much about the second in web-based email.

marknadal 15y ago

Slick interface and the instant search makes me want to use the product. 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.

antonyh 15y ago

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. 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.

meiji 15y ago

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. 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

pghimire 15y ago

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.

mirsadm 15y ago

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.

bitwize 15y ago

Soooo, the solution to stagnating email... is to make it look like Facebook. Not what I'd call "fair dinkum", but...