I’ve been a diehard Gmail user for a decade, so I wasn’t shopping around for a new email app, but tech geeks have been in raptures about Polymail ever since its beta launch less than a year ago, and it’s finally become available to the general public.
“Polymail is one of those apps that when they come along you immediately say to yourself, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done this before?’” says Matt Hussey, who tested an early version of the platform when he was editor-in-chief of The Next Web.
“It’s beautiful, simple, yet deceptively powerful when you need it to be. It’s the first email application I’ve genuinely loved.”
Polymail is only currently available for Mac and iOS, and it syncs only with Gmail, Google Apps and iCloud email services. The app has had glowing reviews just about everywhere, and particularly from people who were disappointed when Dropbox’s excellent email app Mailbox was discontinued in February.
As well as a clean layout with colourful, quirky touches, Polymail has many of the additional features that made Dropbox so useful, and which will delight anyone who obsesses over reaching that elusive “inbox zero”.
You can “snooze” emails you don’t want to deal with right away, archive an email by hitting “Enter”, track whether the messages you’re sending are getting read, and hit “unsend” if you catch a typo just as an email whooshes out.
I was disappointed at first to find that the three inboxes that Gmail divided my emails – between “primary”, “social” and “promotions” – had disappeared, but relieved to find that you could reinstall this by clicking a check box in the “Preferences” window.
Polymail did crash once, it took a long time to properly sync with my account and there were a few glitches. But I understand why users are so enthused.
The app allows you to go through your inbox and file everything away quickly. I might even consider making the switch permanent.
Q&A
Brandon Foo, co-founder and CEO of Polymail
When and how did Polymail come about?
Before starting Polymail, my co-founders and I were working on a development agency and a coworking space, so a tremendous amount of our work consisted of emailing with clients and others. We took a look at all the email solutions on the market, and while there were some useful tools, they were really disaggregated across different Gmail browser add-ons, and even after getting all those set up you still wouldn’t have access to any of them on mobile. We saw a huge opportunity to create a stand-alone email platform that had the best productivity features in a consistent experience across desktop and mobile.
What are your user numbers and funding figures?
We have over 16,000 daily active users, and Polymail has raised around $400,000 from Y Combinator and other investors.
Do you have any other features you’re looking to roll out?
We have some awesome new calendar features that make scheduling meetings over email a lot easier that we’re excited to share soon.
What’s your plan for the long term?
One of our next steps is on ways Polymail can improve email workflow across multiple users in an organisation – for example, allowing a team to easily collaborate on an email conversation with a client, or allowing a team to easily share email contacts and calendar availability. We’re also looking towards integrating other business applications within Polymail – for example, a direct CRM [customer relationship management] integration that automatically surfaces important deal-related information while you’re emailing a sales lead.
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