Edison Mail has just announced a new venture for their company. Currently, they make an email app for iOS and macOS. This summer, they are branching out into something that you don’t see from most email application developers: an actual email service. Email services are something that most app developers don’t attempt because Google, Microsoft, and Apple all offer free services that work very well. But Edison thinks they can offer something unique through their new OnMail service.
With OnMail, it reverses the primary way that email works. You have to give people permission to email you. While this might seem like a new approach, an email provider I used in the early 2000s offered something similar. The company was called MailBlocks. MailBlocks was eventually purchased by AOL. None of the modern email services are using this at an app level, and I think there is certainly some value there. Today, we don’t struggle with as much spam as we did in 2003, but rather just a collection of newsletters, shopping alerts, etc. Most of them allow you to unsubscribe, but that is certainly time-consuming.
OnMail is also claiming to have next-generation search capabilities. Will it perform better than Gmail search? Time will tell. Other additional features of the service include large attachment support, automatic read receipt blocking without disabling images, and enhanced delivery speed. OnMail will offer free and paid plans.
Edison has certainly been at the center of some privacy accusations in the past, so it will be interesting if there is any pushback from users, and if they can convince people that the experience will be worth changing their email address. I agree that it’s probably time for a new email service that does something differently than Google, Microsoft, and Apple. We shall see what OnMail is all about later on this summer.
‘We’ve invested years as a company working to bring back happiness to the inbox,’ said Mikael Berner, CEO, and cofounder at Edison Software. ‘OnMail is built from the ground up to change mail. Nobody should fear giving out their address or have to create multiple accounts to escape an overcrowded mailbox.’
