![]() ![]() The app is universal, and retails for $14.99. ![]() Those features involve mostly turning email into a more immediately actionable to-do list, with a checkbox to mark things as complete and send them to archive, the power set them for review at a specific later date or just a day to a few days away with a single swipe, and the ability to create lists out of emails directly. The challenge then became reworking the Mail Pilot model to implement its advanced features without the use of a third-party server. Also, the privacy implications of using third-party servers to process mail messages made many participants uncomfortable, even with proper encryption and security in place. Since launching in beta back in September, Obenauer said that they’ve learned a lot more about what’s possible using just IMAP from the local applications themselves, and they also learned that the majority of users were dead set against having a subscription for something like a mail client, as expected. “But it was necessary for the server costs and for implementing some of the more advanced features.” “Dropping the subscription was conversation that we had had at least once every month since even before we went on to Kickstarter, because we didn’t know whether people would be willing to pay that, and we didn’t think they would be,” Obenauer explained in an interview. This offers speed and performance improvements, alleviates privacy concerns, and keeps costs down, the founders explained to me in an interview, and as someone who has used both early and later versions of the Mail Pilot beta, I can personally attest to the improvements in general performance. Now it’s a one-time purchase for the app itself, and the app communicates directly with your own mail server, without having to route through a second destination. Originally planned as a subscription service that, like Mailbox, used third-party servers to process a user’s email, Mail Pilot took a late game change in direction, announcing last week that it would be dropping the third-party server model and also doing away with subscription fees. Mail Pilot’s founders, however, believe the new model is better than their old, for backers and new customers alike. But it’s a very different one than it was as originally conceived, which, depending on what backers were expecting, may disappoint a few of them. Here we are over a year after the Kickstarter project officially closed its successful funding period, and Mail Pilot is finally ready to debut its iPhone and iPad app to the general public. The team created Mail Pilot, which promised “email reimagined,” with the goal of turning email into a task-oriented to-do list to help people truly get things done. It sometimes takes a short while, or even quitting and reopening the app, to see newly created lists or find recategorized messages in their proper places.Before Mailbox was even an officially announced project, and long before it sold to Dropbox in what is said to have been around a $100 million deal, Josh Milas and Alex Obenauer took to Kickstarter to fund their very own reinvention of email. Mail Pilot 2’s iCloud syncing is fairly quick, but not instantaneous. You can tap the preview to see the whole thing, or turn the iPad horizontally for a full view. On the iPad, message previews initially appear half-hidden behind the list in vertical orientation, leaving you trying to decipher half a message. ![]() On the iPhone, swiping right on an individual message from the left of the screen returns you to the message list doing so from the center displays the previous message in your list. In addition, some swipe gestures make more sense than others. … while horizontal mode provides a much clearer view. Even on an iPad, and especially on an iPhone, it’s too easy to trigger iOS’s Dashboard when you’re trying to swipe down and see your mailboxes and settings. In vertical mode on the iPad, message previews get cut off by the message list…Īs much as I liked Mail Pilot 2’s ideas, its execution often fell short in my tests. ![]()
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