The Basics

What does Mail Pilot do?

Mail Pilot is a computer application & service that lets you use your current email accounts in a way that is much more intuitive than today's email applications. Mail Pilot reimagines email from the ground up, and is built to fit into the workflow of how people use email today.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Mail Pilot is an email application, much like Outlook or Apple's Mail. Unlike these other applications, Mail Pilot is a re-imagination of how email should work. The first email was sent in the 1960's, and the specification was formalized in the 1980's. This specification has stayed largely the same since, and every email application today is designed based on those old protocols.

We designed an email application to solve today's problems that can still work on yesterday's protocols. That means that you can sign into your Gmail, Yahoo, or any other email address in Mail Pilot.

Mail Pilot allows people to use email the way they think about it. This gives users more control over their email, and they never have to worry about messages slipping through the cracks. It also makes the email process much simpler, and faster.

How did this problem come up?

This problem came up in our day-to-day use of email. We each receive anywhere from 60 to 100 emails every weekday. With this type of volume, which is standard for professionals in our society, the faults and cracks of today's email applications become obvious. We became fed up with people trying to solve the email crisis with crappy ideas.

There are programs that turn email in to a points-based game. Let's face it - email will never be fun.

We've seen programs that use [over-engineered] artificial intelligence engines to guess what you'll be most interested in. These solutions don't work well enough. People are unable to trust these “intelligent” features, and they end up complicating the email crisis.

The last straw was Gmail's attempt to make the inbox more bearable to look at. Settings like "cozy" and "comfortable" scream out for the need for a total re-imagination, and that's exactly what we've done.

How many users do you have?

Right now, we're still in the development stage. We've built a working web application and a mobile app, but there's still more we'd like to do. We’ve been accepted into Kickstarter- a crowd-sourced fundraising platform. Read more under "The Future Plans".

Who will use Mail Pilot?

Our general audience is anyone who needs their email experience to better fit in with their workflow in a more natural and intuitive way. We find that these people tend receive over 40 messages a day, and tend to be working professionals.

How are you different from Gmail? Mail? Outlook?

The major difference between Mail Pilot and all other mainstream mail clients is that Mail Pilot has been rethought, reimagined, and built for the 21st century. Other than cosmetic changes, and unsuccessful attempts at incorporation of artificial intelligence, nothing has changed in the Email client world since email became popular 20 years ago.

Mail clients have spent so much time and effort creating tons of features to "help us stay organized"…however, most of these features just create added levels of confusion and frustration. People are forced to use a combination of folders, labels, stickers, flags, mailboxes, threads, and marking messages as unread in order to keep some form of organization in the chaos. We believe that it shouldn't take so much work to stay organized.

The biggest difference we've included in Mail Pilot is the elimination of read/unread status indicators. We decided that reading an email shouldn't change the status of it. After all, when you open a bill in the mail, its status doesn't change until you pay it. Likewise, the status of your email messages shouldn't change until an action is completed. After all, all emails can be boiled down to items that requires further action.

We also realized that we don't always have the time or ability to deal with certain messages right when they arrive. No one likes staring at an inbox full of messages they can't attend to. Mail Pilot reduces this clutter and relieves this stress. We've incorporated "Mark for Later Review" functions and "Review Mode" sessions into Mail Pilot. Simply mark these messages for later review, and they'll disappear from your inbox until you have time to enter a Review Mode Session. We've also included the ability to group related messages into Review Lists and set deadlines for messages by using the Review Timeline feature.

All other Mail clients have confusing and cluttered toolbars. With Mail Pilot's Drill Down Bar, we've reduced the toolbar to only essential actions and placed it in the center of the message window. This allows your toolbar to fit into a more natural work flow.

A current trend in mail clients is the incorporation of "intelligent" threading. The way most mail clients choose to thread isn't always what you'd prefer. Mail Pilot gives you controls below each message to see other messages in that thread, or all other messages with that sender. Messages won't be hidden in another message's thread just because they had the same subject.

Gmail, Mail, and Outlook are broken. We are fixing years lacking in innovation with Mail Pilot, a huge leap forward for email.

What's the coolest thing Mail Pilot does?

Our favorite Mail Pilot feature is the replacement of the read/unread icon with a complete/incomplete control button. Reading a message shouldn’t change its status. We, as users, should have the control to change the status of our messages only when we’re done with them.

The Co-founders

How did the cofounders meet?

Our paths first crossed through our involvement in the Newman Community at VT (the Catholic Campus Ministry). We were both heavily involved in communications, working together on a new website and video projects. A couple years together we found ourselves both on the Newman Staff: Alex as the Assistant Student Campus Minister and Josh as the Young Adult Campus Minister. With Mail Pilot, we're simply bringing this long-standing working relationship to another level.

How old are the cofounders? Who are you, and what do you do?

We're both 21.

Alex is currently a senior Computer Science major at Virginia Tech. He's been involved in many facets of campus life: working at orientation, developing new Computer Science curriculum projects as a TA, and running the ACM of VT as its president. He initiated and grew software development efforts to help the campus community, including nationally recognized bus tracking app project, and a suite of dining center apps.

Josh graduated in May 2011 from Virginia Tech with a B.S. in Biological Sciences, but couldn't quite leave gorgeous Blacksburg, VA yet. He's currently serving full time as the Young Adult Campus Minister for the Newman Community at VT (The Catholic Campus Ministry). While he was in school, Josh worked in a Biotechnology Outreach Lab on campus and spent his summers working at a Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Firm. He's currently studying to take the Patent Bar Exam to further his career in this field.

Where are you located? Why?

As students at Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!), we are located in Blacksburg, Virginia, set in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Future Plans

Why are you planning to raise money? What will you spend it on?

We have a great working prototype of Mail Pilot, but its not quite market-ready. We're already devoted a lot of time and resources to Mail Pilot, but we need some help to make it to the finish line. The money we raise will allow us to develop more of our ideas, develop native mobile clients, and increase our server space to handle our current and future needs. In order to develop all of our reimagined ideas and make sure they work in all the mobile spaces, we'd love to hire some additional developers who share our passion and vision. See our 6 month plan for more details.

What's your plan for the next six months? How do you plan on growing?

With some additional funds, we hope to have the Mail Pilot web, iPhone, and Android applications market ready in 3 months. In order to do this, we have a plan to focus on five important things in the coming months.

• Hosting. We like Rackspace (we live in Racksburg, after all). We need some serious hosting to deploy our storage-intensive features.
• Native Apps. For the desktop and mobile (that's a lot of apps). We'd love to add more developers to the Mail Pilot team to help develop these apps.
• Development Support. In order to have Mail Pilot ready in this timeline, we need plan on hiring additional development staff to help bring this vision to a reality.
• Push Notifications. This requires the hosting, and the native apps. Push notifications will make Mail Pilot an acceptable replacement for email on the mobile.
• Marketing. We're hoping the efforts that we put in to our Kickstarter campaign will produce enough exposure for a while, but we'd love to be able to bring some teammates on with creative and marketing experience and vision.

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If there are any other resources you need, please feel free to write us! Contact Josh at joshua.milas@gmail.com and Alex at alexander.obenauer@gmail.com.

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