26th March 2015
MailDeck: Beautifully Simplifying Your Inbox & Life
Are you frustrated with the current state of your inbox? A few years ago, Denver’s Stephen Weigel and Jack Freeman of MailDeck were in the same boat – and that boat was slowly sinking into a flood of never ending emails.
Weigel remembers, just before they began back in 2012, becoming more and more frustrated with the lack of solutions and progress in the market as he would spend much of his time at his previous job searching through emails, hopelessly trying to find documents: “It was just a real headache,” he said, “I know it had an attachment and I know who sent it to me so I could type in “Mike” and it would just pull up 100 emails that Mike sent me.”
It wasn’t just Weigel and Freeman that shared this frustration, it was seemingly everyone – and it was from this flood of never ending emails from which the idea for MailDeck emerged.
They asked themselves questions like “Why hasn’t email changed in twenty years?” and “Why are we spending more time emailing than doing the job we were hired to do?”
So, this same year, they began to build MailDeck – an aesthetically pleasing, super-efficient mail app for iOS offering one-of-a-kind features that focus on enhancing your productivity and saving you time to do more important things. The app supports Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, Outlook, Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, and more for iPhone and iPad.
“We kind of differentiate ourselves by giving you the tools to make your email experience a little bit more efficient and hopefully quicker so you can stop emailing and hopefully get out and start doing things you actually enjoy doing” Weigel said.
First and foremost of these features is the attractive design in which your inbox is laid out. This layout will make any of you other inboxes on any other platform look outdated – hence why I say it’s beautifully simplifying your inbox & life. The app offers several viewing options which allow you to view your email in a scrollable list, decks of color coded stacked cards, or in full screen preview.
Another unique tool MailDeck boasts to improve your email experience is its conversation feature. From any message, contact, or attachment you’re able to click the conversation icon which will present you with any other contacts, links, messages, tasks, or attachments that are associated with the item that you clicked the link on. Weigel describes this as “a nice little web of information in your email which makes finding things much easier.”
And how many times have you become frustrated with the search on your email platform? MailDeck addresses this by allowing you to apply multiple filters in a search field – a feature which, as far as we know, is completely unique to this app. Enter a keyword, date range, person’s name, attachment type, and you’ll find what you’re looking for sooner than ever before.
All of this happens on a safe and secure platform. In fact, MailDeck claims “Ironclad Security” for its users. Unlike other options MailDeck “does NOT hold, replicate, or route emails through [their] servers” while “all attachments and emails are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption.” It also offers optional passcode protection that would allow for multiple users on a single device.
Even if you’re someone who is completely satisfied with the standard iOS Mailbox or your other current inbox, I think that the reasons reason for giving the jump to MailDeck a shot is obvious. The app does a great job of allowing you to manage multiple accounts and really brings structure to the inbox. While this may suggest that MailDeck is targeted at more power users, Weigel and Freeman are currently taking steps to make it a little friendlier to the causal users as well.
The two of them, very familiar with Boulder’s entrepreneurial spirit after attending CU Boulder often found themselves making the trip over from Denver for meet-ups and use of coworking space. In doing so they found out about Boomtown Startup Accelerator, where they are enrolled today with our friends at RunSafe, and hoping to have the program help them accelerate the growth of MailDeck, help them get in touch with investors, and help them in marketing their product.
The community has been helpful in the process, as Weigel noted of both Denver and Boulder that they really kind of create “a give first community where you reach out for help from people and everybody is very willing to help… They’re just very open to providing you with the help that you need and the places that you need it.”
As for the future, Weigel and Freeman’s long term goal for MailDeck is to be the go-to email client for whatever platform you’re on. At the moment it’s only iPhone and iPad, and they’re looking next to move to Mac – while hoping in the future to get on Android and PC.
As they bring these power features to every platform, don’t be surprised to see them change the face of email as we know it.
