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Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 68 posts

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#21
Congratulations on launching. I have to say honestly my #1 feedback is the video - it is way too long and does not convey to me the relevant details about your product as you described above. Attention spans are short, and if there is a broken icon image in the video (at 1:49) I will immediately stop taking the product seriously.

Definitely agree that communication software can be improved.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#22

Congratulations on launching. I have to say honestly my #1 feedback is the video - it is way too long and does not convey to me the relevant details about your product as you described above. Attention spans are short, and if there is a broken icon image in the video (at 1:49) I will immediately stop taking the product seriously. Definitely agree that communication software can be improved.

Thanks for your constructive feedback on the video. We realised yesterday the video says literally nothing interesting until 30 seconds in! Had quite a lot of flak about this lol.

Still, there’s a first time for everything and I hope the video can be succeeded by a V2 in fairly short order.

Thanks for your congratulations.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#23
post #5

I may be in the minority, but there's no way I'm using this if it's cloud-based and requires access to my full inbox. When your main inbox is also your second factor of authentication for many services, your backup to your work accounts, and a repository of lots of financial and medical information, it's too scary to share with a cloud service. You could have 100% great intentions and still get hacked.

We do not require any access to your inbox, messages sent directly to your email do not pass through our service. Messages within Plum Mail, are stored on our servers. Central coordination is what enables us to offer features like concluding a conversation and pins that show the same state to all participants. It is a fair concern, one that always needs to be considered when using a cloud service, it is certainly pos…

This should really be clarified on the landing page!

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#25

Some feedback for you: * The features you're advertising are compelling! Pinning and conclusions are very interesting. * As I read through this announcement, perused the website, and watched the demo on YouTube I was nearly driven to madness trying to understand how Plum Mail relates to email. It's not email, but it uses email addresses, has an inbox, and lets me email people. The cognitive dissonance I experienced r…

Thanks for those points, we're trying hard to succinctly explain what we do. We start by saying it's not email because it's easy to think plum mail is yet another email client, which it isn't. plum mail hosts the conversations so it can manage the state of pinning, conclusions etc. email addresses are just a user identifier it will email people if they are not on plum mail, so we don't require someone to be on plum m…

> email addresses are just a user identifier

Email as a protocol I suppose. On top of which some other protocol implemented to provide additional features.

Thanks for doing it.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#26
post #24

Finally an answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854641

We are a cloud service but we are certainly tackling many of the problems you've listed there. I think the reference to groups/rooms sounds similar to what we want to achieve in multi person conversations.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#28
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for those points, we're trying hard to succinctly explain what we do. We start by saying it's not email because it's easy to think plum mail is yet another email client, which it isn't. plum mail hosts the conversations so it can manage the state of pinning, conclusions etc. email addresses are just a user identifier it will email people if they are not on plum mail, so we don't require someone to be on plum m…

> email addresses are just a user identifier Email as a protocol I suppose. On top of which some other protocol implemented to provide additional features. Thanks for doing it.

Sound summary. You're welcome.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not require any access to your inbox, messages sent directly to your email do not pass through our service. Messages within Plum Mail, are stored on our servers. Central coordination is what enables us to offer features like concluding a conversation and pins that show the same state to all participants. It is a fair concern, one that always needs to be considered when using a cloud service, it is certainly pos…

This should really be clarified on the landing page!

Fair comment. I'll work on this.

Re: Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations

#30
I watched the demo video and I'm intrigued! It's like a better interface for group conversations. Some feedback/questions based solely on the demo:

- Will I be able to see who has notifications on or off?

- Relatedly, if someone has notifications off, is there way a way to notify them anyway?

Say for example during the branding discussion they've decided to use Pears instead of Plums, and they want to bring you back into the conversation to make sure that you won't veto that choice before they get too far along.

- If someone who is not on plummail signs up, will the conversations they were previously included in be in their inbox?

- You should put an invite link on the bottom of the fallback emails, or at least have it on by default and allow the sender to turn it off.

- When you added gary@example.co there didn't seem to be any validation. That's obviously not a valid address, so when/how would you be notified that the message failed? Would there be a way to fix the email and resend?

- When someone is added to the conversation I assume they get the full history? What if they're not plummail users? Is there any indication that you're sending to a non-plummail user so you know that they aren't seeing the whole context? Or a away to send them the full context?

- How do you get my inbound email? Do I forward it from gmail to you? Do you act as my MX recipient?

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