Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released on the Mac App Store

http://www.uniboxapp.com

by lassejansen • 13 years ago

25 53 13 years ago

pavlov2• 13 years ago

Looks quite nice, but I'm not going to try it without a free trial.

Changing email clients is a major chore, and I suspect that there's a good chance I might return to my boring old mail client after the initial delight of the new client wears off... With those odds, paying $10 for software that I probably won't end up using is not appealing.

Also, I feel that the word "beautiful" should be banished from app marketing copy. There are many things in this world that are beautiful, but I hope my threshold for beauty never gets so low that a grid view of email attachments would qualify -- that sounds like a state of mental disorder, experiencing Stendhal syndrome when faced with a GUI.

lassejansen5• 13 years ago

If you send us an email to support@uniboxapp.com we'll ping you as soon as we're able to provide a trial version.

pavlov2• 13 years ago

Cool, I'd love to take this for a spin, so great to hear you're planning to have a trial eventually!

niico• 13 years ago

Indeed, looks pretty nice and sharp.

akrymski3• 13 years ago

I've been wondering this for a while - is there a viable business model for email clients? Charging a small one-off fee isn't sustainable really. At the same time charging a subscription (like SaaS) is unheard of for email clients. Email services on the other hand - a different matter. But even with Google Apps - $50 a year for an email service is really cheap, compared to any other SaaS out there. Wonder why that is, when email is so crucial to every company?

MetaCosm• 13 years ago

If you consider playing the consumer lottery and hoping you get purchased a viable strategy, then sure!

jasiek• 13 years ago

Great, so what guarantee do I have that this app doesn't end up like Sparrow?

james33• 13 years ago

You don't.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

You'll just have to live your life on the edge like that.

Touche3• 13 years ago

You want a guarantee that a $10 purchase is improved upon in perpetuity?

bhouston• 13 years ago

There sure are a lot of custom mail apps, is the paying market for mail apps really that large? I just use Gmail in the desktop browser and on android and it seems sufficient.

czottmann• 13 years ago

Not everyone is using Gmail.

twodayslate• 13 years ago

You can customize Gmail and accomplish a lot of things. I don't see a reason to switch when I get a great service for free already.

john2x• 13 years ago

I've been looking for a replacement for Sparrow ever since they got acquired. All of the ones I've tried were very "choppy" compared to how smooth Sparrow is. I hope they offer a demo so I can try it out.

jagtesh4• 13 years ago

My concerns are exactly the same as yours. The choppiness is an extreme turn off.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

If the creators are reading this, maybe they could meet you half-way and do a demo video of the app in action.

jagtesh4• 13 years ago

That would be pretty awesome. Nearly as good as a trial.

lobster_johnson• 13 years ago

I switched from Sparrow to Airmail [1] a few months ago, and it's pretty much as fast. It has all of Sparrow's features -- Gmail and Dropbox integration, unified inbox, search across folders, multiple sender identities, conversations etc. -- plus some minor ones that Sparrow lacked, such as the ability to undo sending.

You need to follow the beta releases [2], though. The Airmail releases have always struggled with minor bugs. Things like some random spaces being removed from emails, or it displaying the wrong email (!). Nothing to ruin your day, and I'm sure it will stabilize eventually.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/airmail/id573171375?mt=12

[2] https://rink.hockeyapp.net/apps/84be85c3331ee1d222fd7f0b59e4...

pkrefta• 13 years ago

I wonder how multi-person conversations are handled - but I cannot try it. Mac App Store seriously needs demo versions support.

dotmanish• 13 years ago

or you can e-mail them to request screenshots of this feature.

jagtesh4• 13 years ago

I've been ripped off before with subpar HTML5 apps wrapped in a native app. If that's not you, I'm willing to bite the bullet and pay $10 bucks.

lassejansen5• 13 years ago

Unibox is a fully native OSX app, webviews are only used for rendering the HTML email content.

jagtesh4• 13 years ago

Thanks for the update. I'll consider giving it a shot.

Touche3• 13 years ago

Nice to see email clients who are supporting IMAP again and not just Gmail.

drcongo5• 13 years ago

Hacker News comments are incredibly depressing sometimes. This costs less than I spend on lunch most days, and looks like a lot of love and attention has gone into creating it. So first off, congratulations on shipping it. Secondly, I've just bought it – I'll take it for a spin and let you know how I get on.

bsenftner• 13 years ago

it actually costs so much more, because of how critical email, and past stored emails are to any professional's life. Can I transparently try it out, leaving me current email client in place? If not, that's too much risk right there, risk of loosing access to past emails is quite the cost.

drcongo5• 13 years ago

Are you still using POP?

justinwr2• 13 years ago

I don't think I've ever tried another email client and somehow lost control of my previous one.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Are you afraid it'll delete your archived backups?

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

Love this concept of niche email clients:

1. Unibox based around contacts

2. Mail Pilot based around to-do lists

akrymski3• 13 years ago

3. ZenDesk based around customer support 4. Close.io based around sales leads

Indeed it seems like the one-size-fits-all email client of today won't be around for long.

Touche3• 13 years ago

Wow, the autodetect is pretty amazing. I'm using Fastmail with my own domain but it correctly knew which servers to use. I always thought that email clients just look at the domain and if it's gmail.com, yahoo.com, it uses those settings, but it sounds like this is checking MX records? Any insight into how it's able to do this (never seen another client be able to)?

lassejansen5• 13 years ago

Yes, we're checking MX records.

mrud• 13 years ago

Mozilla describes a canonical way to detect settings [1]:

1) Use the global ISPDB, e.g. https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/$DOMAIN, e.g https://live.mozillamessaging.com/autoconfig/v1.1/gmail.com and extract the information

2) Try to use the provider specific db http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml?emailaddr...

3) Fallback to http://example.com/.well-known/autoconfig/mail/config-v1.1.x...

It also utilizes MX records and not only the domain.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird...

grinich• 13 years ago

Checking MX records is super easy.

    dig gmail.com MX

skore• 13 years ago

I will never understand the persistent fetish to make E-Mail more like Instant Messaging. Sure, if you only send emails that are a couple of sentences this might make sense. But that's not what people use email for. That's what they use one of the bazillion IM services for. And the IM GUI vocabulary breaks down very quickly for real world email use.

The abstract root of the problem with "let's reinvent email clients" to me is this: There are things that I want to do in email and things I do not want to do in email. The "attachments reinvented" (really?) is such an example: Sure, you could show all the attachments for one person in one place. But when would I use that? In most cases what I want to do is move data out of email and get them where they are useful. Gluing them closer to the emails solves no problem for me.

I get that this is all social and everything, so as somebody who mostly uses email for work, I'm not the target audience. But either you mostly work stuff with emails (then this fails on a number of fronts), or you do mostly social... no wait, you don't do mostly social with emails. That's the problem. And that's why most email clients are not very satisfying for one particular use - because serving multiple uses at the same time simply is a dirty business.

Sorry to fall into the typical HN snark here, but that's how I feel: It does look nice, but so could a thunderbird theme.

Footnotes:

- "Sent with Unibox", really?

- No overview window (at least none shown - do I have to click through the people sidebar to find a recent email if I'm not sure what I'm searching for?)

- mentioning "Exchange" - be very careful here, saying that you support Exchange sets a very specific set of expectations that I'm pretty sure you cannot meet. In any case, you're probably inviting in customers that you don't want and it could cost you a lot of time and money to deal with them.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

> "But that's not what people use email for."

Source? 9/10 of the email I get are only a few sentences. Same goes for emails I send. The reason I use email rather than an IM service is that it easier to keep records. Every message has a subject and searching works well.

fusiongyro2• 13 years ago

Sure, you could show all the attachments for one person in one place. But when would I use that?

People often remind me that they sent me some file a few weeks ago. This happens to me pretty frequently, a few times a month. Right now that turns into a spelunking session (although mu4e helps a lot) but if I could just see all the attachments from that person in reverse chronological order it would make it much easier for me to find things.

For what it's worth, features like this would be hugely helpful to me in my work.

lassejansen5• 13 years ago

Unibox has this: http://www.uniboxapp.com/faq/attachments/list

bbx• 13 years ago

Is email still people-centric? Looking at the 25 latest messages of my inbox, only 8 are from real persons. The rest comprises 5 newsletters and 12 notifications.

Close friends I contact via SMS mostly, and other friends I contact maybe twice every 6 months.

Maybe my email usage is unusual, I don't know. Still, Unibox's market is a niche. Good luck to them though. It's always interesting to see new approaches towards a medium as old as email.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

What do you for business? My use for email is communicating with clients (all real people :).

Aloha• 13 years ago

if I look at my raw mailstream his case might be correct, I aggressively use filtering so most of what makes it to my inbox is actually mail.

lassejansen5• 13 years ago

Unibox works pretty well for newsletters and notifications. They get grouped into one contact by sender, so e.g. 4 Twitter notifications only take one slot in the contact list.

It works also really well for notifications that contain attachments. If you have e.g. a github account that sends invoices you can select the Github Billing contact, go to the attachment list and have all invoices in one place. I don't copy attachments to the filesystem anymore because it's much easier to find them in Unibox.

drcongo5• 13 years ago

First impressions are very good. It's extremely smooth and responsive, the experience when replying to an email is excellent, and it feels an awful lot lighter than Mail. The people paradigm in the sidebar didn't take a lot of getting used to though it'll take a fair bit more use before I can decide whether I prefer it. At the moment it feels to me like there's another sidebar missing, one that would take me directly into conversations.

Only drawbacks I've found so far: search seems to make it go a bit sluggish and it's not that easy to actually find what you're after. I seem to have sent it into some kind of spin by hitting the sync button which brought up this error:

An error occured while syncing account [redacted] (2001):

Could not parse command

Overall though, I'm liking it and I'll give it a go as my primary email client for a while to see if it can replace Mail for me.

drcongo5• 13 years ago

Oh, and I can't work out how to star/flag a message.

songgao• 13 years ago

Nice job! Although a lot of my emails are not people-centric, but topic/project/event-centric. Unifying them into categories by people would make it harder for me to keep track of the content.

Would be nice if topic-centric could be added.

jsdalton2• 13 years ago

I love it in principle. I actually dove in and purchased it since I've wanted for so long an email client built around people.

I have a few criticism after actually using it (admittedly for only a few minutes here):

* The lack of an "Inbox" is disconcerting. It actually really is important to me to just see a list of emails in my inbox, most recent on top, with unread messages marked as such.

* People centric is great, but conversation centric is equally important. Apple Mail and Gmail get high marks on organizing emails by conversation thread, but both I found lacking in their organization by person. This app has the opposite problem: It's great for viewing emails by person, but that's like the ONLY feature. I really strongly dislike how it munges together different conversation threads under a person, which at the same time excludes other emails from other people that were part of that thread.

Maybe they'll add these features later but for now I'll probably slink back to Apple Mail and maybe keep an eye on it.

YMMV

justinwr2• 13 years ago

"Hide Unibox group" under Advanced in the Settings. I had the same initial experience.

drcongo5• 13 years ago

I've just tried that but it doesn't seem to make any difference to the issue described above.

rkuerzinger• 13 years ago

I really strongly dislike how it munges together different conversation threads under a person, which at the same time excludes other emails from other people that were part of that thread.

That's what the thread view is for. Simply click the small icon next to a message's subject (the one with the number of emails in a thread) and you'll all of the referenced messages.

jsdalton2• 13 years ago

Thanks that's actually a helpful tip.

It doesn't quite solve the whole problem for me, which is that:

* I like to scan conversation threads (of all conversations I'm having presently, not just those involving a single person) -- it's one of the primary ways I look at my mail.

* I find having all of the messages munged together from different conversations I'm involved in with a person to be disconcerting ESPECIALLY since those messages lack the context from other people involved in the context. It's visual cacophony to me. Contrast this with Apple Mail VIPs: When I click on a VIP, I see all of the conversations I'm involved in with that person, not the individual messages.

That's just me and my brain. I could of course just be an anomaly.

akrymski3• 13 years ago

Full disclosure: I'm at a YC startup working on a people-centric email service at Post.fm

Great to finally see some people adopting a similar approach to us, however the real trick is figuring out the balance between threads and people. Simply grouping emails by people doesn't work for most professionals who often have threads with multiple people. This is one problem that's taken us years to solve - and only now we finally have an algo that gets the right balance I believe.

Interesting fact - Post.fm used to be called unipost.com, so unibox is a very interesting name :)

Show HN: Unibox, the people-centric email client released on the Mac App Store

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