Show HN: pigeonal.com, a read-only email app

by evaneykelen on 3/30/2012, 5:37 PM with 3 comments

Appcoast is a small collective of entrepreneurs and engineers, working on extensions for eBay and bespoke work for Mozilla by day, and working on The Next Big Thing by night. This week we launched our first commercial iOS app.

Pigeonal is an email client for iPhone. Its purpose is to quickly archive (and occasionally mark for follow-up) emails which only need a casual glance, or a quick check, before you file them away (examples: receipts, notifications, reminders).

The app scans your inbox for (currently) 207 different services and displays the results using icons in pigeonholes (a wood texture cupboard).

Q: Why only Gmail and MobileMe/iCloud? A: We'll roll out general support for IMAP, but it takes a lot of testing. IMAP is hairy.

Q: Can I flag/star an email for follow-up? A: That will be possible in the next version, flagged email is currently moved to a Follow-Up folder (which also works great, both in Gmail and MobileMe, but some people prefer flagging/starring).

Q: Are you crazy? Asking money for a read-only email client? A: The read-only feature is a deliberate design choice: it prevents you from being sucked into an email conversation. We ask money for the app because we think it provides value for some people.

Q: Are you storing my email credentials on your servers? A: No, your email account credentials are only stored on your phone using iOS keychain and are only sent to Gmail or MobileMe/iCloud.

http://www.pigeonal.com/

  • by MatthewPhillips on 3/30/2012, 5:59 PM

    I think you're on to something here, but I would pivot just slightly. Let me explain.

    The problem with email today is that it has many uses which we try to manage through a single client that has gone mostly unchanged for 20 years. You've brilliantly picked up on this. Having a separate app for managing notifications seems obvious now that I've seen your product, don't know why I never thought of it before this.

    However being able to delete notifications is absolutely essential. Diving into a separate tool (not built for notifications) would be unfortunate.

  • by sidcool on 3/30/2012, 6:27 PM