Kagi Mail: Suggestions Based on My Personal Email Experience

amazingefren

Recently, I've been experimenting with different email providers and have some ideas I'd personally like to see implemented in Kagi Mail.

Without knowing the current plans, planned features, or wishlist for Kagi Mail, I'll give an overview of the aspects I find most important.

Core

What I think are the most important aspects I look for in an email service

- Custom Domains

I currently use two domains. There are tons of use cases to have.

- Email Aliases

Especially under custom domains, I've put a lot of work into organizing aliases by use case. Some people may need many; I currently keep about 14 in rotation.

- Security

This is a heavily mixed bag and a tough one to balance. There's the SECURE end (e.g., ProtonMail) where this is the primary focus, which comes with downsides. For example, having to install a bridge service to use Proton outside the web interface tends to be a bit extreme. E2EE is a big selling point for many people. For me, the security of my data not being sold is enough. It's a tough pill to swallow for some: email is inherently insecure. Just because my end might be encrypted and stored only on Proton's servers, the sender still has an insecure copy of the exchange.

- Family (IMPORTANT FOR ME)

This is where I've struggled the most, with Fastmail currently having a strong grasp. My partner and I share email aliases to easily track household notifications (e.g., shopping, living). Having a family plan/system is a major thing for some people.

Niceties

Things I feel are driving factors when deciding between capable systems

- Filtering / Labeling

Using Fastmail, filtering emails into folders/labels has been extremely easy. This is a pretty big plus. Throughout my day, I can easily select what I want to see. For example, I could have financial emails, but I might not want to see them right now. By having those filtered into a folder, I’ll know I have unread emails there but can spend my (relatively short) time looking at the focus of my email viewing session (e.g., work).

- UI/UX

Opinionated as always, a good and modern UI/UX is important, but it doesn't need to be flashy. One of the things I missed the most when jumping from Proton to Fastmail was the icons next to the sender's email. Having to read each email card to identify the contents might seem picky, but when you have a clear distinction between rows (in the form of the favicon or whatever it's called), it's much easier to navigate between them.

- AI

I know, I know, I personally don't rely on AI that much, BUT my partner does. She uses her email a lot more than I do for work, and having an AI system in place for composing has been a massive improvement for her. I'm guessing this was already planned based on Kagi Assistant, but I could be wrong.

- Performance

It might not seem like it, but once you've tried using a slow email service, it does bug you (Outlook 👀).

Not as important

Personal opinions*

- Native desktop apps

This might just be me and more focused on the EARLY stages of an email service. While nice to have, Fastmail's design and performance have been phenomenal on their web-based interface. I gladly prefer their PWA to most email clients I've tried—it's wicked. If it were up to me, I would focus most of the effort on getting the email service RIGHT and in a comfortable position to remove the overhead of managing feature rollouts on web vs. apps.

The ??? features

Could be important, can't say what its like without them

- Calendar

Honestly, I haven't tried using an email service without a calendar. I know this is a MAJOR announcement for some services (Tuta 👀). I can definitely see its benefits; calendar events via email are pretty important, so this might be important, but I'm not really sure.

- Drive

Similar to above, I haven't used an email service without a drive. I've used drives on other services for attachments. I'm not really sure how emails operate without it.

Wishlist Features

Things I would like to see

- Templating System

The number of times I've composed emails using a template I copied from my Obsidian vault is insane. This isn't that important but can be a really nice feature to have.

- Support / Feature Deliverability

As I've seen with the rest of Kagi, having excellent communication about the services, development, and roadmaps has been one of the biggest reasons I've stuck around (besides the offerings being a work of art, of course). What I would NOT like to see are half-baked implementations similar to what I've seen on Proton. I always switch to Proton, stick around for a bit, and am always disappointed with how their systems interact, often feeling as if they are checking boxes for a feature rather than correctly integrating it.

There is so much more, catch-all system, masked emails, gmail sync, calenadar sync, but I am way to tired. My biggest focus writing this was on the please don't miss these

Implementation Details

I've given a pretty broad brain dump on my opinions, while they may seem obvious at first, its extremely frustrating to see existing mailing services miss some of these things.

I'll give some insight/context on some of these topics for better detail

Custom Domains

A major driving force for the ability to scale an email service is the ability to make it easy for potential human and corporate clients alike to migrate to a new service without having to dedicate a ton of resources to do so.

It has been easy for me to jump ship on an email service without major reconfiguration when I know where I'm moving allows me to bring my domain with me, no need to update my 400+ accounts to a new email for a full migration. I setup my new service, update my DNS, and after a small bit of configuration on the service, I am back to focusing.

Email Aliases

Another no-brainer - I have dev, shopping, contact, work, etc emails. I could manage these through my DNS if I need to, but having the capabilities built-in would allow me to manage / filter these into folders/tags or whatever (like below).

MAJOR KEY: clicking reply should reply from the alias (provide a switchable dropdown to choose the email to reply from)

Family

OH MAN - this is the biggest driving factor for me personally, for me and my partner, having a good way to manage our emails is CRITICAL. We have two domains we balance around depending on use case - personal vs business - when working together (lets say a team of 2, but is relevant for many businesses) We like to have the ability to have an email that would be the equivalent of an Organizational Unit.

Personal Example:
email sent to: shopping@personaldomain.tld
effect: we both receive the email, in whatever folder we filtered it through, and both are able to reply to the email by that alias AND OR a different alias. We should be able to both see the context of that conversation.

Company Example:
email sent to: security@businessdomain.tld
effect: team should receive the email, in whatever structure, and the team should be able to reply to the email (NOTE: some businesses like to have control over who actually gets to reply emails going to this alias). This is extremely useful for my company as we have shared responsibility for emergency channels.

Filtering and Labeling

Folders vs Labels vs new different system. I can't really think of any major improvements in this field, some people like to have emails go into a folder (not duplicated, this is me btw), some people like to have emails go into multiple sections based on label (this is my partner). I can't come up with something new here, would simply say - without a new solution, best to have both of these options available.

UI/UX

I have no suggestions and am PERSONALLY flexible, some people want the traditional layout, folders/lables/categories on the left, email rows in the middle, email contents on the right. Might be good to have a toggle between traditional and whatever you guys are planning based on beta feedback. Or just YOLO it on a new approach all together as long it keeps it visually easy to jump around (Email Sender Favicon PLEASE)

AI

Assuming the privacy/security is good; (maybe have a toggle to prevent automatic AI usage?)

Email Compose AI - self explanatory
Email Summary AI - on single email window and/or a general overview (e.g., what are my latest updates on email about XYZ)
Email Smart Context AI - compose context suggestions based on email contents (e.g., When you get the chance, take a look at the recent events happening in XYZ - powered by Kagi Ki)
this list can go on and on and on...

Performance

Some people really just want to look at their emails quickly and exit the app as soon as possible (me) - when it comes to performance, prefetching, lazy loading, and smart email loading mechanisms will make a massive difference. I don't want to see a huge splash screen in my face for ₃ seconds (proton/outlook) of course things like this depend on many factors but in reality, much of the content should have a pretty good FCP and low TBT.

Templating System

I've been using Obsidian Templaters plugin to create templates for my personal notes, work tickets, email compositions, and much more to make it easy for me to minimize the amount of time I'm spending writing things on obsidian. Something similar I think would be extremely valuable to have in an email system.

This could be done in

A. A tempting engine - such as that found on Obsidian Templater - could be a pretty big uplift - maybe start with option B

B. AI based response suggestions - allow Kagi Assistant to generate a response on command

C. Both

Command Panel

This came up in my head as I was writing this, I'm a huge keyboard person, a command panel (such as that found on obsidian & monkeytype) could be used for many things
Some Ideas

KEY_COMBO > ai: some action : present AI action items
KEY_COMBO > compose: create new X : email, calendar event, conference invite
KEY_COMBO > help: Y : present help pages or resources for utilizing kagi mail

amazingefren

Templating System
amazingefren B. AI based response suggestions - allow Kagi Assistant to generate a response on command

Seems gmail went this route, not a bad idea since it would likely require less work to get implemented

This does open a bit of a privacy concern over AI contextual usage for reading emails as I stated before - IF privacy is a big focus, probably would be best to have this as a user-invoked request

MomentumBuffet

Good post and for reference, I'm currently at 226 aliases w/ SimpleLogin.

Since this is the pinned post on Mail, I'm also going to go off topic and share my thoughts on it more broadly:
Like the reaction on Mastodon, I'd much rather you continue staying focused on your core offer of Search rather than spreading yourselves thin by trying to do everything that Google fails at.
Stuff like Translate, integrates well with search, but I don't see any reason why you should get into Mail other than "Well, Google does both." Is video conferencing next? And then a VPN service, domain registrar, DNS server, etc.?

With time, sure. But right now this looks like shiny-new-object-syndrome rather than a serious business strategy.

nichu42

MomentumBuffet I agree. Now that we have a topic here, I'll repeat what I already wrote on Discord (in shorter words, though): Kagi is a fantastic service that greatly enhances my internet experience. As soon as there is a new release, I drop practically everything and immediately read the changelog, scanning it for features that make my life easier. Kagi is already great and I am very grateful to the team behind it. However, numerous features are still missing in the core functions (for example, native apps that make all functions easily accessible, persistent file uploads in the Assistant, etc.). I'm afraid that Kagi will become too broad in its offerings, and we will end up with moderately maintained and only mediocre products. I would rather see Kagi continue to be a specialist, where the existing offerings simply run perfectly and are up to date. Innovation is important. But those who want secure email already have numerous market providers to choose from. Perhaps there will be a surprise, a special function that is really new to the market. But in my opinion, it's still not worth rebuilding what already exists elsewhere with a lot of resources. Mail is coming, I've already seen pictures. But I hope that the Kagi team reads these lines and takes them to heart in their next decisions. Please stay true to yourselves.

Vlad

One thing to understand is that from day one we are building an eco-system, and one does not achieve the mission of making the web more humane with a single product. We want to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech. Search, browser and email are the three main touchpoints to the web and we want to have an integrated product portfolio so you can do cool things like surface your email in search, and use Assistant in email. We want Kagi to be a global brand recognized for offering user-friendly and user-centric gatewat to the internetn alternative to big tech. All the products we built so far integrate with one another - Kagi is the only search engine which can summarize individual results or translate them on the spot. There will be much more of this in the future.

I'd love to keep this thread focused on email as a product and what are some cool things that we can do on top of getting the basics right.

Vlad

Plus, let's be real, what can beat Doggo fetching email 😉

RoxyRoxyRoxy

I could take Kagi Mail or leave it, I think it’s good Kagi wants to branch out but I don’t want it to come at the expense of making current projects better. I use ProtonMail and am completely satisfied with their offerings (just renewed for another year) so I would not use Kagi mail as a main email.
That being said, aliases and “fake” emails are something I am in constant need of. I use iCloud+ for that now and have over 100. The iCloud one is of course optimized for Apple devices so using it on desktop is a little annoying. Firefox has 5 free ones but you have to pay for more, which is a cost I don’t really need. I think Kagi could fill this gap wonderfully.

EDIT: Just saw @Vlad posted while I was writing this up. I think that having replacements for big tech is a 100% fair goal to have, but right now you’re going to run into the following issues:

Most people are likely to have an email provider they’re happy with already (me)
Kagi users especially are likely to already have a privacy-focused email provider they’re happy with already (also me)
Email is pretty much a solved problem, I don’t know how much there is to innovate in it besides integrating with other Kagi services. Instead of making one unified email service for Kagi users it might just be the xkcd “there are now 15 competing standards” situation.

I think once Kagi is a bigger name outside of mostly just tech circles you’ll see this be less of an issue, but right now I feel like these (and people wanting focus on existing projects) are going to be the main opposition.

Dustin

RoxyRoxyRoxy FYI (you may already know this) but Proton owns SimpleLogin and you can quite smoothly generate SimpleLogin aliases inside supported password managers (like Bitwarden and Proton Pass).

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Dustin I had no clue, thank you! Still would love to see it in Kagi mail tho 😉

Desoroxxx

Native desktop apps

Maybe it could be integrated into Orion?

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Desoroxxx Considering Orion for linux is estimated to take a year to release and Orion for Windows hasn't even started yet, I'd want a separate app in the near term if possible. Once Orion is out and has parity across all operating systems Assistant could be integrated.

EDIT: My bad, thought this was the Assistant desktop app thread :) What I said still applies tho haha.

brgustavoribeiro

Let me add my two cents: conducting market research would be a great idea here to figure out what people actually want.

Would Kagi Mail be good? Absolutely. But is it necessary? Would it be worth the effort?

Anyone who has worked on maintaining email services (I have) will tell you it’s an absolute nightmare -- one of the most difficult, time-consuming, and tedious tasks in IT. Can Kagi comfortably take on this responsibility if [most of] the user base has no intention of using the product?

Personally, I’m completely satisfied with Proton and have no intention of switching anytime soon. Launching another email service feels like adding a product that might make users of Kagi’s core features question whether this is the right direction. As others have said, email is a solved problem, and this would just add more redundant competition in an already saturated space.

Kagi is amazing, and I do believe it should evolve into an ecosystem, but there are other, more urgent problems to address.

classicsc

OP's suggestions are great, especially the family organization part.

One other thing I would highlight: spam filtering, particularly blocking modern scam and phishing emails that come from hacked accounts and websites and not just the "obvious" sketchy providers and spoofed addresses. Anyone who has a long term email address probably knows how hard this is even for the biggest players. The inbox of my old gmail that I created during the beta is nothing but scams and phishing now. For my personal domain, however much I wanted to like Fastmail, the spam filtering was so useless that I gave up and switched to M365. Masked emails for each account can help shut off the barrage from an email that's been in a database dump, but they're not a panacea.

Spam in my inbox is mostly just annoying to me (I have low tolerance for any kind of unwanted notifications), but if Kagi Mail was going to be something I'd feel good about recommending to less tech/security savvy friends and family, I especially wouldn't want the protection against phishing to be an afterthought.

As for what good protection looks like in implementation, I don't have any great ideas off the top of my head, just saying it's a priority for me.