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

by richardesigns on 8/21/20, 7:00 PM with 65 comments

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.

  • by anderspitman on 8/21/20, 7:57 PM

    > 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.

  • by smt88 on 8/21/20, 7:44 PM

    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.

  • by jedberg on 8/21/20, 10:00 PM

    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?

  • by ffpip on 8/21/20, 8:09 PM

    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).

  • by jve on 8/21/20, 9:17 PM

  • by primitivesuave on 8/21/20, 8:51 PM

    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.

  • by kfk on 8/22/20, 11:14 AM

    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

  • by portmanteaufu on 8/21/20, 8:19 PM

    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...

  • by webmons on 8/21/20, 7:34 PM

    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

  • by cassepipe on 8/22/20, 5:24 AM

    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.

  • by DanielKehoe on 8/22/20, 1:03 AM

    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?

  • by crispyporkbites on 8/21/20, 7:55 PM

    Does this use SMTP under the hood? I.e. can I join in a group conversation without signing up to a proprietary system?

  • by weedpeg on 8/23/20, 4:35 AM

    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.

  • by gregwebs on 8/21/20, 10:36 PM

    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/

  • by prawn on 8/22/20, 1:07 AM

    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.

  • by maxpert on 8/21/20, 11:56 PM

    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!

  • by bluesign on 8/22/20, 9:05 AM

    This reminds me of Google Wave little bit.

  • by arrty88 on 8/21/20, 8:30 PM

    A feature rich google group? Awesome!

  • by motu on 8/22/20, 3:34 AM

    How does this compare to Outpost? teamoutpost.com

  • by WiF3cap7ShUth4 on 8/21/20, 7:55 PM

    Look like "The messenger - Delta Chat".