Mail Pilot is a Kickstarter project that has been in the work since Feb 2012. What it is doing is to connect to your email accounts and turn all your emails into a to-do list. You can then interact with your emails either by completing them or mark it for future review. It is a pretty interesting concept, but can it make you more efficient? Let’s check it out. Once you have created an account with Mail Pilot, it will prompt you to add your existing email account to the list. It supports a wide range of email services, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, iCloud and any other email services that supports IMAP.
While testing, I find that it doesn’t works well with Gmail accounts. I can’t add a Gmail account and I received a intrusive attack notification email from Google. I have no problem getting it to work with Yahoo though. Once it has connected with your email account, it will prompt you to select the number of messages to mark as incomplete. In the usual email term, this means how many recent emails you want to keep unread in your Inbox. Remember that your email is now a big to do list, so you have to re-wire your brain to think differently.
After the setup, you should be able to see your emails in the dashboard. Clicking on the email will show its content on the right panel. From here, you will be able to mark it as complete (read), mark for general review (save it for later), or open the Advanced menu to add it to calendar or correspond with the sender. You can, of course, also reply or forward the email to others.
At any point of time, you can click on the icons on the left pane to access your review list.
As an email client, it also allows you to compose and send email. If you have associated several email accounts to Mail Pilot, you can even choose the email address to send the email.
Afterthoughts
Conceptually, I think Mail Pilot is a good project as it forces you to interact with your emails rather than marking them as unread/read and forget all about it later. The ability to mark an email for review at a future date is also a useful feature as it allows you to return later when the email become more relevant. However, the implementation of the concept, at this point of time, is rather weak and not intuitive enough – the lack of a “delete” button in the mail panel clearly explains it. There is no pricing information available as it is still in beta. If you love to give the public beta a try, it is available today. Try it out and let us know if it solves your email woes. Mail Pilot
