Once an idle moment hits, most of us default to going through email on our phone.
Chuck, a new iPhone app from 410 Labs, is looking to make it a time to effectively organize email and continue the quest for Inbox Zero, as well.
“The paradigm that people brought to dealing with email [on mobile] is very much a porting of the desktop experience, and we thought it was time to radically rethink what the needs of people on mobile really are,” said 410 Labs cofounder Dave Troy.
The company found a wide user base (and revenue) with its web-based inbox cleaning app Mailstrom. On mobile, however, users still had to scroll through emails one at a time.
Hey y'all, meet Chuck. He fixes inboxes, and you're about to hear a lot more about him… @chuckemail https://t.co/bUxI5PgGW9
— Dave Troy (@davetroy) January 17, 2017
Chuck groups the emails for reading or deleting. It organizes messages into categories like sender, subject and time period. It also filters based on whether a sender is already in a user’s contact list, or whether it’s unread. Multiple accounts can be also be grouped together. Bringing it to the iPhone also adds swiping and tapping to the mix.
“This is basically the kind of thing we’re doing with Mailstrom, but nobody’s doing this on mobile yet,” said Troy, a longtime entrepreneur and leader in Baltimore’s tech community.
Chuck’s tag line: “The fast, safe, mobile way to keep your inbox under control.”
The six-person, distributed team at Mt. Vernon-based 410 Labs has been working on the app for about two-and-a-half years. That’s around when advances in a phone’s technology made it possible to build such an app. Troy launched various civic-focused projects in that time, but said the 410 Labs team has been “heads down” working through the challenges presented by doing something new, and getting feedback through user testing.
Now the focus is on growing users. With this week’s launch, it has a high rating on the App Store, and is featured on Product Hunt.
“This ought to be able to get to a much, much wider audience,” he said.
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