Kagi Mail: Suggestions Based on My Personal Email Experience

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.

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