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

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.

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.

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.

Disclaimer: I work on it!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The format in Plum Mail is more longform rather than chat as such. Delta Chat is a cool service.