Launch HN: Plum Mail (YC S20) – Email alternative for group conversations
Hello HN! Plum Mail (https://plummail.co) is a messaging app that gives you better conversation features than email and instant messengers. These features help make conversations more useful and easier to get value from.
Today we're launching Plum Mail in early access. You can join our Wait List to be one of the early users by emailing yesplease@plummail.co.
Email is disorganised, instant messaging is distracting and group chats are hard to keep track of. But email is great, because everyone has an email address. Why can’t we build an awesome messaging platform that lets us keep our email addresses? Our insight: keep the email address but replace the emails with something better.
The first thing we want to fix is group conversations. Conversations between three or more people in email get messy quickly. We can solve that with the ability to break off-topic messages out into sub-threads or the ability to conclude a thread. We’re working on the ability to highlight text and pin it to a noticeboard so important pieces of information don’t get lost in high message volume.
To help solve the issue of distraction created by platforms such as Slack, we’re introducing features like inbox delay, group chat message rate limits, and a complete lack of notification noises. Our design philosophy is respect and simplicity. We do not want to nudge you to check your inbox with things like red dots or read receipts.
We are also offering greater control over adding and removing people from conversation threads. Here’s a demo video showing some of this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-82ychDgA&t=6s
Peter and I started Plum Mail because we had these problems with email and IM ourselves. Group chats quickly get out of hand. We find it really hard to organise our annual ski trips with friends in Whatsapp. Half our mates just want to share hilarious GIFs that smother the conversation we’re trying to have about dates or hotels or ski hire. I love a funny GIF as much as the next guy so we probably just need to think about where the funny GIFs live and where the details about our hotel reservations live. i.e, not on top of each other.
We also have 12 months' experience working exclusively on passwordless authentication technologies in our company DID.app. We realised that the marriage of passwordless authentication with a common messaging platform could be a happy one.
Our vision for Plum Mail is to position it alongside other premium inbox products on the market to people that care about new features enabling them to have great quality conversations online. However, Plum Mail will remain open and accessible to all at some level so that users can enjoy the freedom of writing to anyone (whether they’re a user or not) whilst enjoying the clear benefits of messaging inside a common system instead of over email protocol.
We would love to hear your thoughts. In particular, what do you dislike about either email or instant messaging? Anything goes! This feels to us like an opportunity to re-imagine how communication online can work. > email is great, because everyone has an email address I've been thinking lately that the ability to send messages is perhaps the less interesting role of email. The real value comes from providing globally unique, federated identities. It's not perfect but it's pretty dang good. If for no other reason, this is why Slack or any other closed system will never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only) way to recover an account. Not setting up another walled garden is really important to us. Otherwise we just end up with the situation of another competing platform, as is well explained in this xkcd comic.
https://xkcd.com/927/ We hope people will like being able to keep using their email address but get more features they are used to in other more modern platforms. 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 possible to have the convenience of Plum Mail for some conversations and keep financial/medical sent directly to your email for peace of mind. 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. All good points. Plum Mail is B2C and HN is a well-informed technical audience it's probably fair to say. We felt we needed something less abstract than just a fruit in the name to explain what you do in this application - i.e. you write to people and they write back like when you send and receive mail (distinct from 'e'mail). We toyed with using the word 'messenger' but that's much less representative of the longform way in which Plum Mail nudges you to write. Messengers are synchronous, one liner, emojis etc. At least with the word mail in the name, anyone hearing about it for the first time can have a pretty good guess at what it does. The technicality of using the email address as the identifier and passwordless authentication etc is important (but probably only really interesting to a technical audience). Thoughts? 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! You're so right. They would get hugely annoyed. Plum Mail isn't a messenger really, I mean sure you could use it as such but then you could use email like that too and cause just as many notifications. We're planning daily digest emails to group together multiple messages with individual reply buttons. Showed it and explained it to my gran and she seemed to get it just fine. This is a woman that couldn't understand why her iPad wasn't charging until I explained it did actually need plugging into the wall. lol. I think anyone would get confused and irritated by some weird confusion over email and Plum Mail. I think the next step is to ship v1 and see how users get on with it. I'll try to remember to report back what we learn. We aren't trying to create messages at the frequency of chat. Features like pinning and others aim to encourage more productive, and also less frequent messaging. This should really be clarified on the landing page! Fair comment. I'll work on this. 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? > Will I be able to see who has notifications on or off? As of now you will not, but we have been asked this question by other users and are looking for feedback on the right way forward. > Relatedly, if someone has notifications off, is there way a way to notify them anyway? We want to introduce @mentions so that in larger group conversations you can highlight messages for a particular participant, this would notify that user even if they were not receiving notifications for every message. > If someone who is not on plummail signs up, will the conversations they were previously included in be in their inbox? Yes > You should put an invite link on the bottom of the fallback emails All fallback emails allow a user, new or otherwise, to immediately access that conversation on plum mail. > so when/how would you be notified that the message failed? Would there be a way to fix the email and resend? If we get a bounce back from an email address you will be able to see that in the conversation. > When someone is added to the conversation I assume they get the full history? Correct, if they are added to a conversation with history, they will be able to access the conversation from the fallback message this will give access to all previous messages. > How do you get my inbound email? Do I forward it from gmail to you? Do you act as my MX recipient? For now we don't handle inbound emails sent directly to your inbox. plum mail is the place for your group conversations that benefit from our unique features. We don't see much value in forwarding other transactional emails into plum mail. But we might look into it in the future. Congratulations on the launch! You're trying to fix the very thing I hate about email - It sucks when it involves more than a single entity, be it conversations, sharing stuff. It's only good when it's a single email (login, newsletter, etc). Thank you. Keen to agree with the point that email is useful and good at in the right place but groups certainly needs work! 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. Plum has some interesting ideas, if you're interested in a different approach to this problem, check out https://www.twobird.com Disclaimer: I work on it! FYI your home page doesn't display quite right on Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/kjs0nPR.png Thanks for the heads up! Thanks for fixing it :) Seems great. What's the pricing or how do you make money ? Hi again, I answered this one up above too. Free to all (system is open to all) with premium features for a modest fee. 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. 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 way, you’ve hooked users of all attention spans to view the rest of your video. This is similar to an executive summary, only in video form! Good luck. I’ll sign up for an invite. 1. https://twitter.com/_adontai/status/1296512040442433538?s=21 Update: punctuation and minor clarification 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. 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 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 reminded me of the old SNL sketch That's Not Yogurt[1]. If this truly isn't email, I suggest trying to be crisper about what why that's the case. [1] https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/thats-not-yogu... 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 mail for you to start talking to them. > 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. Congrats on the launch. Was pulling my hair out trying to coordinate tasks in applying for a mortgage between me, my wife, the banker, the insurance company and the title people. I thought to myself it'd be great to have something like shared inbox but for personal use. Would love to test this Separately, why there isn't a tool used by the mortgage broker to facilitate this, I have no idea. It's a nightmare of documents and tasks that makes the whole process 8 times as long. There’s a million tools like this out there but brokers just want to get deals closed so they fall back to whatever is preferred by the borrower which is always email. Thank you. You certainly can test it, thanks for joining the list. Your situation is exactly the kind of thing we'd love to solve. We had a similar experience communicating with accountants. Plum Mail is not a shared inbox as such but it is a shared platform so the features you probably need to make life easier talking to multiple people are then possible. This would reconcile with email but for one thing : In my social group nobody uses emails to communicate, because of the very problems you're trying to solve. Meaning I would need to get my friend on the service or else it won't be a very efficient tool to communicate.
It is although quite unclear that you act as an email provider and not an app that accesses your emails (Did I even get that right?).
It is also unclear if there's a price tag or how you intend to make money. Agree. A system with none of your friends or colleagues on is pointless because there is no one to talk to. I'll try to be really clear about what Plum Mail is and is not! We haven't done a great job of communicating this thus far. Plum Mail is NOT an email client. Plum Mail IS a communication platform using a central server similar to how an instant chat platform works. Where we differ is that Plum Mail isn't a 'walled garden' where you need to invite users in to use it. Users are identified in the system by their email address. If you write to someone that is not a Plum Mail user, then we send that message out as an email to that user with an option to reply. That reply button gives the user immediate access to Plum Mail in order to write back to you. We're doing this passwordlessly. Right at the genesis of this idea we didn't want to build a system that required you to invite all your friends to it before it became useful. Revenue wise, referencing the above point, Plum Mail has to be free. We will offer premium features for a modest fee. Thanks for the explanations! 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-up form? 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 Interesting part about Zulip is it is really amazing for less frequent users. I usually come back to 3000+ unread messages and catch up on all conversations that I find relevant (thanks to stream>topic hierarchy and Recent Topics view). Also, its trivial to have multiple teams on the same Zulip org, people are just subscribed to different sets of streams. So, say you have two teams: mobile and desktop, for example. You can have streams prefixed with that name: #mobile-hangout
#mobile-issues
#mobile-support OR #m-hangout
#m-issues
#m-support Good conventions for stream naming makes it really natural for multiple mostly isolated teams to exist on the same Zulip org, and share some streams like #announce, #general, etc that everyone is subscribed to. Anyone have experience with Odoo? Does this use SMTP under the hood? I.e. can I join in a group conversation without signing up to a proprietary system? SMTP is not used under the hood. You can send messages to anyone with an email address. That person may not have accessed Plum Mail before. In that case, the message sent to that person is sent as an email with the option to reply. So you can stay within your email to take part in that conversation or you can access it in Plum Mail for the full feature set. Congratulations on the launch! Watched the video and loved it :)
1. Quote and Pin are definitely super useful.
2. It would be great if there is a way to click on quote/pin and corresponding mail in the thread opens for more context. Thanks so much :-) The pins will definitely do this. I didn't quite manage to get it to work ahead of the video but the idea is each pin is a link back to the message from where it was pinned. I'd like the same to be true for the quote. So much easier than writing 'I'll reply in line' and the copy/pasting all the time. We can definitely do this. This reminds me a lot of aether pro which is also a backwards-compatible email enhancer. Their main feature seems to be Slack-like channels. https://aether.app/ Cool product, thanks for sharing.
It looks like it's focused on inter team communication. plum mail is somewhere you can talk to anyone who's email you already have. 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. Is it just me getting bothered or somebody noticed that too? Quote and pin had broken image links. O come on! You never do demo with broken images! This reminds me of Google Wave little bit. A feature rich google group? Awesome! We offer more features than would be possible with an email group. plum mail hosts the conversation and certain features like pinning require a user to interact with the conversation within plum mail. How does this compare to Outpost? teamoutpost.com Nice looking site. Plum Mail just isn't an email client or a shared inbox. We can offer shared inbox functionality in Plum Mail if users would like it but you can also do simpler public support channels. Look like "The messenger - Delta Chat". Similar in that you can contact anyone with their email address without that person needing to 'sign up'. This openess is important. The format in Plum Mail is more longform rather than chat as such. Delta Chat is a cool service.
