Postbox is desktop email application that includes a host of features that led judge Tim O’Reilly to call it a “personal information management client.” The company presented as part of today’s session on Language & Communication Tools, and comes from an experienced team that includes Scott MacGregor, one of the original developers of Mozilla’s Thunderbird Email client. And as soon as I get an invite, I’ll be installing it.
The first major change that Postbox brings to the space is an improved media search engine. Instead of having to browse through messages to find attachments, users can view all images or documents as thumbnails, making it easy to find the files you’re looking for. Text and URL searches have also seen improvements as well. Results are displayed in context, so users don’t have to manually open each message to find the message they’re looking for.
Postbox also includes full integration with a number of social media and reference sites. Users can use the client’s right sidebar to quickly search for media, addresses, and webpage across the web from sites including Yahoo Local, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. For example, I could search for “Michael Arrington” in the Flickr image search, see the results in the client’s sidebar, and drag a photo into one of my Email messages without leaving the client. The application also allows users to post to these services, without having to provide their private credentials.
Perhaps the most exciting new feature in Postbox (and the reason why I’ll be downloading the application as soon as possible) is its ability to sort conversations and create a dynamically updated address book. After tagging a message, the system is smart enough to apply the same tag to all further messages within the conversation - no more tagging messages one by one as they come in. The service can also use your social networks to assign information to each of your contacts. Xobni, a plugin that launched last year at TechCrunch40, has similar functionality, but it’s still only available for Outlook - the Postbox client will be available for Mac and Windows.
Click here to watch the video of Postbox’s presentation.
Panel
Josh Kopelman - I had a few questions. Do you support POP, IMAP, Blackberry exchange?
Postbox - We’re commited to supported open standards when possible. Working towards beta.. (still hasn’t answered the question..).
Jason Calacanis - Yes or no?
Postbox - IMAP POP SMTP… All supported
Tim O’Reilly- If this wroks, I find it very attactive. How far have you pushed it scalewise.. I have all these thousands of email messages..
Postbox - We’ve scaled it interally, with message sets around 10,000 messages, worked well. We’ve also used it with 30k messages and it performed.
Tim O’Reilly - Are you shredding this into XML?
Postbox - We’re based on SQL Lite
Evan Williams- Is the slick UI enough to combat massive move from desktop to web based email?
Postbox -People are approaching from a different way. We can do everything we showed you and protect privacy, because you don’t have to pass credentials. We anticipate helping people add new services. We view this is sort of an information hub.
Tim O’Reilly -This is not so much an email client as much as a personal information management client. this like picorp that was acquired by VMware, basically their initial product vision is exactly what they’ve built.
Om Malik - I dont have gmail.. I think gmail is very convienient, there are many plugins that do the same thing as what you’re doing ion the browser. How do you get paid for it?
Postbox - Service neutrality.. if you’re using email service on Yahoo, they want to do interesting things in email as well, but they direct you back to your properties, same thing with gmail. We let you pull from multiple accounts, you control destinaty of the data. The business model. We believe that connecting email content to online services is key difertiator, once we direct content to other seri cces, thre’s opportunity there. there’s vertical opportunies with busines verticals
Jason Calacanis:
Who here would download this?
*Half audience raises hands*
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Was there any mention of an estimate of when a beta would be released? Fall, Winter, 2009? It certainly sounds like it has those extra little things people would love.
Registered for the beta, hope it’s out soon.
Jason, we’ve approached a similar set of problems at ClearContext by focusing on adding capabilities to Outlook. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....anageable/ for more info. Our Attachment Explorer lets Outlook users navigate and preview the images and attachments in email just like surfing through email - more info on our free product is available at http://www.clearcontext.com/personal/
That’s the problem. You’re limited to Outlook. Microsoft has a strangleghold on corporate mailboxes, but not for much longer if Google keeps winning them over the massive installs of GMail and Google Apps.
Google Apps is not winning over ‘massive’ installs at all.
Seriously? Corporate America is not going to give up Exchange any time soon.
Besides, I used GApps for a while and I ditched it when GApps’ SMTP servers got blacklisted and I couldn’t send e-mail to someone who has a local ISP.
-Adam
Maybe if Google comes out with a GMail appliance so that the service can be brought in-house.
Outlook add-ins or standalone clients will never make a real impact. Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes have a near monopoly in the enterprise. This is because MS and Lotus control the full client/server pair — which is what you need to drive progress in tandem. Both MS and Lotus have already moved on to unified communications — which is not possible for a standalone email client like Post Box.
That’s why we created both a unified communications server and client for Unison (http://www.unison.com). It’s the only way to compete against MS and Lotus.
BTW: Google Apps has zero presence in the enterprise, despite what all the Siliconvalistas might believe — enterprises do not trust Google on privacy, legal compliance, uptime and several other deal killers.
Looks Great!
Postbox is destined for success. Mail apps today are incredibly painful for the large datasets that we’ve been seeing on mailboxes lately, especially for rich media.
I am absolutely psyched for this product — the team is brilliant (Scott MacGregor is awesome) and it fills a huge need.
Desktop software is not dead, and neither is email. Postbox could be the the email client to end all email clients. Great work, guys.
Yes, desktop software IS dead Garry. How many desktop apps do you use a day? I use FireFox, MSN messenger and Photoshop. That’s down from about 20 apps 2 years ago. Everything is moving online and when broadband catches up, traditional desktop apps such as photoshop, IDE’s, etc will all be online. Mark my word.
Hm… Well to note some applications that have online counterparts I use Word(or Pages), Excel(or Numbers), Powerpoint, Access, iPhoto, iCal, Remember the Milk (instead of toodledo because of google gears offline access).
Applications that I have gone completely online with, Gmail?
Hybrid offline/online applications will be strong suited for the future of business I agree, but I don’t believe that all applications will reside online.
Hybrid appliations I use, Google Docs (with google gears), Remember the Milk (google gears), Google Calendar (iCal/BusySync), Evernote.
Anyways I guess the point of my post would be to the accentuate the need for hybrid/sync applications over strictly online apps. Google Gears is an amazing breakthrough in the offline access of online apps and pretty much disproves your theory that “desktop software is dead”. Not to mention applications that will never be able to spare the freedom of your OWN resources.
Don’t get me wrong — the web is awesome and will continue to evolve… but for absolutely best-of-breed experience for things that take a lot of bandwidth or cpu cycles, local is still best.
Email clients today are just not engineered to handle multi-gigabyte mailboxes… but you know what, computers are advanced enough that they absolutely should be able to do it, and do it fast. That’s why there’s a huge market gap, and that’s why there were so many hands raised at the demo today.
You’re not going to do CAD/CAM on a web app. You’re not going to play 3D games on a web app. You’re not going to do full motion video editing on a web app. (Well.. you can do basic versions of all of these things on the web, but not the PRO/best of breed experience.)
So why do we have to deal with massive amounts of email with a web app?
I recently switched back to Thunderbird from gmail-only just because it really is faster. (Also, gmail has been a bit infuriating lately.)
Desktop apps are not dead. See, there are some of us who don’t use Gmail for our e-mail and actually have an account with a provider that uses a REAL IMAP implementation and therefore use a desktop e-mail client.
Also… I’d rather use things like MS Office to Google’s or Zoho’s offerings on the web. And how well do you think that Photoshop would work on the web? Seriously? Do you use it for any large tasks? I use it for large files at work and it taxes the hell out of our graphics workstation.
-Adam
Any email client that actually works is more than welcome here. I’ve been through Thunderbird, Opera, Mac Mail, Entourage and back to Thunderbird this year already.
This looks pretty sick - can’t wait to try it.
Why would I want a desktop software for that matter this particular application. Vista does the searches of media, do need another application. Its something like having copernic or google desktop with vista for search of local system.
Some features actually in zenbe.com
It’s going to take a lot to shift business people from Outlook. It’s just so robust and reliable, that’s important. I have 2 Gb of mail in my Outlook (2003) and it rarely misses a beat. An alternative would have to be very, very good.
I also use Thunderbird for personal/non core business stuff and keeping an eye on some RSS feeds. But it’s clunky and I have to shut it down from time to time to get it to rebuild indexes, which is annoying. My money is on Postbox displacing Thunderbird and anything else that people use for a local mail client.
[Disclaimer: I am one of the developers of Inbox2]
Is this the inbox 2.0 that we have all been waiting for? Almost, but not quite. I am still missing a lot of the deep integration with my social network.
Check out inbox2 at http://www.inbox2.com which not only allows you to do exactly what postbox promises but also goes much further by taking the integration with your social graph to the next level.
Last but not least inbox2 has some open source sauce that allows you to actually share the stuff buried in your inbox over email. Eg, not only find a url or file hidden in your email but send it as an url or file to somebody else, easing not only your own email experience but also that of others.
We’re coming out with a public alpha in september, 3000 invites are available so have a look, might find it interesting.
Sounds interesting. I see that you are showing the MS Exchange logo on the Inbox 2 web site.
Are you aiming for Inbox 2 to be a replacement for Microsoft’s existing web client (Outlook Web Access - OWA) or more ?
We’re not necessarily aiming at a OWA replacement because we enable a richness scenario, whereas OWA enables a reach scenario. Think the ease of use of sending documents through inbox2 (really as a document and not as a an attachment to an email you were forced to create because your email client told you to), versus the “works wherever there is a web-browser”.
Small typo above, the public alpha is scheduled for October
Postbox looks good, but there is still no useful Exchange client (I mean for calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.) for the Mac available. Sure Entourage is good, but misses some things. Apple Mail is fast, the Thread view is god given, but no calendar integration with Exchange.
My take is, as long as there is no real Exchange integration a lot of companies will never look at alternatives. Sad, but true.
Well Exchange also has IMAP support (altough unfortunatly disabled by default). Currently inbox2 supports exchange over imap, we are working on a new channel to allow integration with exchange over its native protocol. This includes contacts, calender, etc.
I used Xobni… very good and intuitive but on a daily basis I didn’t know how useful it is… may be I am not aware of all the features… want to try as soon its available
I’m not much on saving email myself. It’s MailWasher on the receiving end and the super fast loading nPOP http://www.nakka.com/soft/npop/index_eng.html for sending.
So is this thing just available on the Mac? Or is there a Windows version, too? See, unfortunately, as much as some of us would love a mac, the cost of entry is prohibitive and we’re stuck on Windows.
Will this support PGP? If so, you’ll have my money.