Your inbox is now a to-do list...

Today's email apps mark your email as "read" as soon as you open it, even though you still have to act on it. All messages require further action: deleting, replying, or some other activity.

In Mail Pilot, reading an email doesn't change its status. Each message has a complete / incomplete control button. All new messages arrive as incomplete and remain that way even after you've read them.

Click the complete / incomplete control button to mark a message as complete only after you finish any further action associated with that email. Messages marked as complete are then archived, and can be accessed later by searching or browsing.

Your inbox is now your assistant…

Today's email apps limit your organizational tools to folders, labels, tags, and marking messages as unread. Many messages require further action, later: on a specific date, upon completion of a task, when related messages arrive, or simply when you have more time. Today's email apps leave these messages cluttering your inbox.

In Mail Pilot, you control when you review messages. When you don't have time for a message, click the "Mark for Review" button. This message disappears from your inbox. Later, when you have more time, you can enter a "Review Mode" session to fly through these messages.

Mail Pilot can do even more for you. When marking for later review, tell Mail Pilot the date on which you wish to review a message. On that date, it will reappear in your inbox. Mail Pilot also allows you to group similar messages into custom review lists to be acted on as a group. Review these lists once you're ready.

The Mail Pilot Difference

Single Login

Gone are the days of having to configure all of your different email accounts on each of your devices. Link all of your email accounts to your Mail Pilot login, and they automatically sync with all of your devices.

Account Compatibility

Mail Pilot works with all major email services, so you don't need a new email address. There is no need for importing anything: Mail Pilot constantly stays in sync with your current email accounts.

Complete / Incomplete Control Button

All new messages arrive as incomplete and remain that way even after you've read them. Mark a message as complete only after you finish any further action associated with that email. Completed messages are archived to decrease Inbox clutter, but can still be accessed by browsing or searching.

Mark for Review

When you don't have time for a message, click the "Mark for Review" button. This message disappears from your inbox. Later, when you have more time, you can enter a "Review Mode" session to fly through these messages.

Review Timelines & Review Lists

Tell Mail Pilot a later date on which you wish to review a message. On that date, it will reappear in your inbox. Mail Pilot also allows you to group similar messages into custom review lists to be acted on as a group.

Autopilot

Set Mail Pilot to automatically mark specific messages for review, skipping the inbox. For example, send all messages you've been CC'd in to be reviewed when you have more time, set weekly newsletters to be reviewed on a specific date, or automatically have responses to a job opening put into a specific review list.

Browse

Find emails more quickly and intuitively. Mail Pilot automatically determines your recent top contacts, and places their icon in the browse box. Click an icon to immediately see messages involving that contact.

...And Much More

We've been working on tons of other reimaginations to the email client. Intelligent Compose, Intelligent Reply, Drill Down Bar, Similar Messages, Calendar View, Pilot-to-Pilot, and many other features will be making their debut with Mail Pilot.

How can I get Mail Pilot?

Our Kickstarter Campaign has Begun!

To speed along the development of Mail Pilot, we’ll be starting a Kickstarter campaign on January 19. Kickstarter is a crowd-sourced funding platform that curates creative and innovative projects. We’ll set a fundraising goal and timeline and develop a series of Kickback rewards for our backers. Once the campaign goes live, anyone can pledge money to Mail Pilot (anywhere from $5 to a couple hundred). Once enough people pledge, and we pass our fundraising goal, Mail Pilot gets all the pledged funds, and our funders get kickbacks from us.

Your Role:

1. Tell everyone how excited you are about the Mail Pilot project. You can Post to Facebook, Tweet about us, or share on Google+.
2. Enter your email in the “Let’s Stay in Touch” box below, and you’ll be first to know when our campaign goes live.
3. Pledge what you can. Any support will help make Mail Pilot a reality. And don't forget about the kickbacks - each pledge tier comes with kickbacks - and we've got some great kickbacks to offer you.

Where the money will go

We’ve been developing Mail Pilot for months. We have a working prototype, but there's more we'd like do before launch. Some of these things are going to cost us, including:

1. Hosting. We need some serious hosting space to deploy our storage-intensive services.
2. Native Apps. To ensure the best experience, we plan to develop native apps for the desktop and the mobile (that's a lot of apps). We’ll need to bring on some additional developers to get these done in time.
3. Push Notifications. Push notifications will make Mail Pilot a full replacement for email on the mobile. They also require additional hosting, and the native apps.
4. Marketing. We hope the efforts we put into our Kickstarter campaign will produce enough exposure for awhile. However, we realize we’ll have to put more time and energy into marketing before we officially launch Mail Pilot.

Here's our story.

Who are we? We are students of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. We met while working together at the Newman Community of Virginia Tech. In preparing for graduation, we knew we faced a bleak job market. Rather than settling for menial jobs that wouldn’t maximize our strengths, we decided to create our own dream jobs. After all, everyone thinks about their ideal job, but few people have the opportunity to create it. Our dream is not only to create our own jobs where we get to make others lives better, but to (hopefully) create jobs that will fulfill the dreams of others as well. We use email frequently, receiving an average of 60 - 100 messages every weekday. We quickly realized that the world is in an email crisis.

Alex Obenauer

Technical & Creative

Age: 21

Hometown:
Woodbridge, VA

Favorite Publication:
Entrepreneur

Favorite iPad App:
Flipboard

Computer Science Major,
Virginia Tech '12

Email Alex

Alex is passionate about designing and developing smarter solutions to real problems. He loves finding practical ways for technology to help solve people's problems. He enjoys designing software that will interact with people in a thoughtful way.

We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future...

- Nikki Giovanni

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Josh Milas

Business & Legal

Age: 21

Hometown:
Forest, VA

Favorite Website:
IPWatchdog.com

Favorite Winery:
Pear Valley

B.S. Biological Sciences,
Virginia Tech '11

Email Josh

Josh cares about science, technology, logical thinking and productivity more than any normal twenty-something should. All these interests intersect in a passion for Intellectual Property law and entrepreneurial business strategies.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

- Thomas A. Edison

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