#shortmail

Hi Tunghsiao, Thank you for being an early adopter of Shortmail. We are writing today to let you know that the Shortmail platform will discontinue operation on July 31, 2014.

We’re proud of the many innovations Shortmail brought to email and we appreciate your support. However, we have decided to focus all of our efforts on our rapidly growing inbox management product, Mailstrom.

If you would like to save any of your messages from Shortmail, you can download messages to your preferred email client from your Shortmail account via IMAP or POP (see details here) prior to July 31. After July 25th, any email messages sent to a Shortmail address will be bounced back to the sender. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We created Shortmail to try to solve some key problems faced by email users, and we have heard from users that Mailstrom solves many of those problems, and then some. Mailstrom works with Gmail, Hotmail, iCloud, and other IMAP email services. Mailstrom gives you email superpowers: unique views and powertools to quickly cut through clutter and get and keep your inbox under control. Spend less time on noise, and more time on the people and tasks you care about. Here’s a recent review of Mailstrom from MakeUseOf.com.

You can try Mailstrom for free at Mailstrom.com. Please give it a try and see if Mailstrom is right for you. We will also be launching a new version of Mailstrom for iOS this fall – sign up to get access!

And as a valued Shortmail subscriber, we’re offering you a 20% discount on a Mailstrom subscription, if and when you choose to subscribe. Just use the promo code 10OFF.

Again, thanks for your support of Shortmail … and we hope you’ll try Mailstrom. We think you’ll love it like Walt Mossberg, Jenna Wortham, and these folks do.

I really like this idea.

I have been enjoying, even preferring lately, using Facebook messaging for my conversations. Anytime I am tempted to email, or I get an email from a friend that is on Facebook, I have often tried to redirect the conversation to Facebook messaging.

Why? It's conversational. It doesn't feel like delivering a packaged formal message, but instead a back and forth of short notes. If we are both online, it's even instantaneous (with push notifications to my phone). If not, it shows as a simple contained conversation feed.

The problem is that FBM has no IMAP, I can't get this content anywhere except the FB site, or my FBM app on my phone.

The only place I would deviate from the article's suggestion is the character limit. The conversational structure itself will guide people towards brevity, however I don't want to force it. This is the one reason I am not using shortmail yet. I love everything about it...except the character limit (which is of course, the central implication of their very name). It creates an imposition on my friends who might just want to send me a message that is 510 characters long (especially if it contains a link which itself could be 100 characters or more).

If shortmail had configurable limits, or even no limits, I'd be using it by now as my primary email interface. I love the conversational stucture. I love the fact it has no attachments. Gmail lite would essentially be taking a very similar route (plus...I am already on gmail).

Issue 1: It's not gmail. Gmail benefits from a powerful crowd sourced spam awareness mechanism. All of gmail's users respond to spam, and it uses all those responses to further filter spam.

Issue 2: shortmail by its nature, uses your Twitter handle for your account name, and Twitter handles are, by design, one of the most public and widely available pieces of information about you. I could hide my gmail account name from you if I wanted...but my Twitter name is so trivially easy to figure out, and now, it can receive unsolicited messages. 

This has been on my mind lately. I keep feeling that somewhere between email, SMS, and instant messaging, there is a messaging nirvana that gracefully incorporates all mediums somehow. It will likely include a companion integration to something like dropbox or evernote (or MS Skydrive, or google docs...whatever) to handle bulkier attachments, leaving a smooth medium to move simple communications to our eyes in an easy and friendly way.

Back in July, I trumpeted my hatred of email in a very loud (and perhaps obnoxious) way. Naturally, I followed that up by switching careers from one that relies heavily on email to one that relies extremely heavily on email. Joy. 

But hope remains.

One of my favorite finds during my time away from email was Shortmail. It's email, but short — get it? The problem with it was that it's not a standard, and the service itself didn't have a good way of notifying you of new messages without using — wait for it — email.  

But that changed today. 

Now live in the App Store is Shortmail's iOS app. I've been testing it for a couple of weeks and it's great. It's not robust enough for people to change their habits just yet, but it's a start. So download it, use it, and quit email. You fucking hate it, you know you do.

I'm not an investor, I'm not an advisor, I'm just a fan of the idea. And I approve this (not nearly short enough) message.