![]() For a long time we’ve discussed the challenges of making pro apps on iOS a sustainable venture, as have others. It’s hard to believe how much time has passed or how much our products’ core questions and concepts have carried on.Īt the same time, it’s also hard to see the future of indie software developers sustainably shipping native apps for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. Mail Pilot, and our second product, Throttle, have together brought lots of new and renewed ideas to email - many of which have become industry-wide standard features for email apps and services over the years. Just over 1,600 backers later, Mail Pilot’s campaign succeeded, and Mindsense was founded. But we certainly did not expect the outpour of support that we got, from an entire community equally as excited as us about the prospect of making email better. When the Kickstarter campaign launched, we didn’t quite know what to expect. The concept I came up with was too compelling to be a homework submission. ![]() The prior September, I had decided not to submit an assignment to my senior year computer science course on the design of information. (As I mentioned in my previous review, the very considerate help files tell you where to find those messages, should you wish to retrieve them in another client.) This focus doesn’t diminish Mail Pilot’s quality, but it does potentially limit the program’s audience.With little more than our first wild idea, dozens of ignored press pitches, and some hope, we launched an all-or-nothing crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in January, 2012. It’s entirely devoted to its task-list approach to email, and as part of that mindset, it will squirrel away your completed or set-aside messages in its own elaborate system of IMAP folders. ![]() Powerful preferences: You’ll likely want to turn on some of the security features tucked away in the preference pane.ĭon’t go to Mail Pilot looking for fancy OS X integration, calendar tools, or other bells and whistles. And if you’re a grizzled old email dinosaur like me, know that there’s still no POP support-Mindsense explains that POP would prevent them from implementing some of Mail Pilot’s features-although Exchange compatibility’s planned for a future release. In addition, you can view and move messages to existing IMAP folders, but you can’t create new ones. I also had a hard time telling which messages were read or unread, because Mail Pilot cares more about whether you’ve completed them or not. Despite checking and rechecking the correct settings in Mail Pilot’s excellent help files, I ultimately had to delete the account and set it up from scratch again to get it working. The Outlook IMAP account I’d set up in a previous version initially didn’t work when I fired up this one. That said, Mail Pilot still does fall short in a few areas. Then I checked the Preferences, where I found options to display the URL of links within emails, turn off all hotlinked images by default, and load previews only for certain types of messages, among other abilities. I initially worried that the program contained too few protections against phony or malicious emails. Indeed, Mail Pilot 1.1 kept thwarting my reviewerly attempts to find fault with it. Trawling through a pile of messages gets much easier with Mail Pilot 1.1’s improved search features. (Mindsense was able to replicate this glitch, and says it’ll be fixed in the next update.) These hiccups weren’t frequent, and posed only a minor inconvenience. Other times, quickly attempting two different searches in a row would bring up a list of blank message headers. Sometimes searches would show results before I was finished typing, or inexplicably jump back to the last term I’d searched for. In my tests, searches were fast and accurate – although they occasionally got a bit jittery. Where its predecessor could only search by contacts and subject lines, the new edition adds whole-message search as well. Version 1.1 has also made big improvements to its search feature. It’ll even add a pencil icon to those threads in the message list to remind you when you’ve got a work in progress. Rather than storing your draft in a separate folder, Mail Pilot keeps drafts attached to their respective message threads. Drafts are saved automatically, and even if you quit the program and restart it, you’ll still find what you typed waiting for you. You can now start working on a message, wander away, and come back to it later. Better late than never: Mail Pilot 1.1 adds a very well-thought-out approach to saving draft messages.ĭraft messages are the new version’s biggest and most crucial addition.
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