Automate the whole thing. Get rid of the interface.
You know those virtual assistant services people use to manage their mundane emails? Imagine if you automated all of that.
It sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can I allow a machine to reply for me?
But I would start with the simplest mundane use cases. If you can automate complete handling of even a small percentage of a busy user's emails, they will be delighted. On your end, you don't have to literally automate it on day one. You can semi-automate it with some human help and over time use the data to reduce the human input.
Over time as the user got more comfortable, they might not mind automating more of their emails.
I fully agree that SMTP is broken. It is so obvious when examining DKIM.
IMO a new protocol is something that can come later, we've explored that, but only an email service in a leadership position can make those sorts of changes to the standard thus forcing others to implement them.
At the end of the day there can always be a more efficient protocol, but I don't think that's the biggest problem in email.
In what ways will your service be faster than gmail? How much time will I save?
There isn't a single inbox as such, there are people, and groups of people, with correspondence between them. Like in Facebook or a CRM system.
What Gmail query do you have to do to see the correspondence between you and PG, assuming PG has 3 different email addresses? How do you find that email from some company you don't remember the name of?
These are just some examples of things that are truly intuitive on our system. I don't mean to sound snobbish, but it's a bit like trying to explain the first iphone - its like a PDA without a stylus. But we all know the iphone is ultimately so much more. So you really have to try it for yourself.
I understand that claiming to be better than Gmail leads to lots of scepticism, and I have a huge amount of it myself every time I see a new email app. Luckily, noone has quite done what we're doing just yet, but its only a matter of time.
All I can promise is - its better for me and all my friends that have tried it. But that doesn't mean it will be better for you, or for some insanely heavy email user like PG, but I sure hope so.
Oh and in terms of speed, yeah its faster. In fact we've just had to rewrite everything from scratch to make it blazing, moving almost all the logic to javascript and caching everything client-side. And did I mention its awesomely beautiful compared to Gmail? :) But really thats the low hanging fruit - Gmail looks awful, more so every year it seems. Sure some people don't care about that, but I'm a horrible perfectionist which is why we're probably the oldest startup still in stealth.
I think many people need to actually see it first and then be motivated enough to play with your public beta. If your want lots of people to try , keep the video as simple as possible.
You can't explain the iPhone with words, to someone who never seen it before. They just wouldn't be interested.
Good Luck.
You're building a faster horse instead of a car.
The solution lays in semantic communication. As long as you mainly communicate with text that someone has to read, analyze and understand, you're doing it wrong.
Chat / IM is text and yet that isn't a problematic communication medium because there is a small set of people you chat to. The problem isn't the number of emails, sentences or words, its the number of people we are connected with, its relationship management.
Sure some magical AI to read emails and books for you, summarize them and even reply for you may be great. Or organize your mail into folders for you based on clustering or some ontology. The problem is these solutions never work.
Our focus is on organizing mail around people, and in turn organizing people into groups, which is not some magical silver bullet, but still a radical improvement over an unorganized mailbox.
It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that could grow into an email replacement over time, or some add-on to gmail to give us early traction, etc. We focused on replacing Gmail from day one. And that's no small feat, cause who wants to use a minimum viable email service?
We also realize it's a huge bet, and we may be wrong. But at least we're building something for ourselves, so we can't be too wrong, and that thought keeps us going.
Can't say I agree with "Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list."
Email was designed to be the electronic version of a letter - an async messaging channel. Not some to-do list protocol. But with increased volumes managing all that mail became difficult (I'm sure celebrities still struggle to catch up with physical mail). That's the problem we want to solve, by letting algorithms and better user interfaces help you manage your mail.
A to-do list is something different in my view, but naturally closely related (and should be part of the same application). A piece of mail often prompts you to create an associated to-do item, but today this functionality isn't integrated so we rarely bother.
Sure IM, Twitter, and To-Do list apps chip away at some of email's use cases, just like instagram is doing with facebook, but we're confident that email can be just as good if done right.
Now I just have to finish it and avoid thinking about my idea for the google-search-killer that would be oh-so-easy to try out ;)