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

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

#51

Post by richardesigns »

prawn wrote: post #38

Seems laborious to manually pin details from an email. Could Plum or the sender automatically suggest pins? Eg, any bold text? When I email people, I often bold key things so they can skim and get the details immediately.

Yes it could. That's a little way down the road development wise but sure, cool idea. Version 2 of the pins will include links back to the text in the email thread. If you've got 100 messages in a thread this is essential.

The skimming you mention is the level of efficiency we are trying to get to. i.e. surfacing the key pieces of information.

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

#52

Post by richardesigns »

jhatax wrote: post #42
richardesigns wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice to see this on HN because someone commented that I should try Plum Mail on one of my tweets about email [1]. The service looks quite compelling. Kudos on the launch. Regarding the video, may I suggest that you use the first 10-seconds as the “trailer” for the service. The trailer should cover the top-5 unique features —- your service’s USP —- and dive into each feature one by one for the rest of the video. This…

Thanks Adontai. Agree on the video. Not made a video like this before! It was a fun experience but there are certainly improvements to be made there. Thank you.

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

#53

Post by crowdhailer »

chromedev wrote: post #40
DanielKehoe wrote: post #37

Interesting. Could Plum Mail be suitable for communication in an open source community? There's a range of group communication platforms, including email newsletters, Slack channels, and Discord (and originally email lists and UseNet) that can be either distracting, hard to search, difficult to thread, or difficult to join. Is there a mechanism for people to invite themselves to a Plum Mail conversation from a sign-u…

Why would you want to use a closed-source solution for an open-source solution? Zulip, Mattermost, Matrix, Rocket.Chat all seem like more ideal communication and community platforms. There is also Odoo that handles CRM/ERP type solutions.

We have a different focus than most chat services.

Zulip and others can only be used within one team, we want to build a system that can be used for all conversations, hence the fallback emails sent to people not yet on plum mail.

We also are trying to choose features that encourage less frequent, more productive conversations, not be just another chat interface

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

#54

Post by crowdhailer »

fishywang wrote: post #47
crowdhailer wrote: post #11

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…

Wait. I might be reading your comment wrong or missing something, but my understanding from your comment is that you are just using email addresses as the identities of a group chat system, instead of actually using emails as the group chat?

You are correct that email addresses are identifiers in our system, and that emails themselves are not the core mechanism within the app.

However this approach allows us to have features that would not be possible in just emails, but still have fallback interactions via emails to users not yet on the platform.

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

#56

Post by kfk »

Do you have any plans around QnA functionalities? Enterprise users send me a lot of emails and it would be great to be able to promote some of the answers from me or my team to a knowledge base. Users could also send new questions from your search bar which would give them previously answered topics as they type the subject

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

#57

Post by smt88 »

crowdhailer wrote: post #54
fishywang wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. I might be reading your comment wrong or missing something, but my understanding from your comment is that you are just using email addresses as the identities of a group chat system, instead of actually using emails as the group chat?

You are correct that email addresses are identifiers in our system, and that emails themselves are not the core mechanism within the app. However this approach allows us to have features that would not be possible in just emails, but still have fallback interactions via emails to users not yet on the platform.

I perceived the product incorrectly, just like GP did.

The people I know who don't use Slack yet are mostly older and mostly use Outlook. I think they'd be confused and irritating if we sent them emails with the frequency of chat.

Especially phone email notifications are not tuned to correctly handle instant messages.

I have often dreamed of a similar concept, but have never been able to work the UX out in my mind. Hopefully you have. Best of luck!

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

#58

Post by crowdhailer »

kfk wrote: post #56

Do you have any plans around QnA functionalities? Enterprise users send me a lot of emails and it would be great to be able to promote some of the answers from me or my team to a knowledge base. Users could also send new questions from your search bar which would give them previously answered topics as they type the subject

That is an interesting idea, and not one we have yet thought about. I would be interested to talk more about it with you.

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

#59

Post by fishywang »

crowdhailer wrote: post #54
fishywang wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. I might be reading your comment wrong or missing something, but my understanding from your comment is that you are just using email addresses as the identities of a group chat system, instead of actually using emails as the group chat?

You are correct that email addresses are identifiers in our system, and that emails themselves are not the core mechanism within the app. However this approach allows us to have features that would not be possible in just emails, but still have fallback interactions via emails to users not yet on the platform.

Thanks. In that case, I'm confused on why do y'all choose to emphasize email that much in your product's introduction (you even have the word "mail" in your product's name).

Email is like one of the most common used identity, if not "the" most common used one, for web/cloud services. It's used as identity for roughly half of services in the wild, yet they don't put email/mail in their names, or emphasize that they are email alternatives.

You said emails are not the _core_ mechanism within the app. Maybe besides using them as identities, you also use emails for other, "non-core" way? Can you clarify on that? Maybe it's only me but it really confuses me that you emphasize email in such a way but only use them as identities.

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

#60

Post by kfk »

crowdhailer wrote: post #58
kfk wrote: post #56

Do you have any plans around QnA functionalities? Enterprise users send me a lot of emails and it would be great to be able to promote some of the answers from me or my team to a knowledge base. Users could also send new questions from your search bar which would give them previously answered topics as they type the subject

That is an interesting idea, and not one we have yet thought about. I would be interested to talk more about it with you.

Feel free to email me
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