After using Fluent.io as my main mail app for the last week. I’ve a few more thought on it since I first reviewed it
More good stuff
Search
I didn’t noticed this the first time, Fluent adds a search timeline to most search results - as above. This allows you to quickly filter results by time. This is great and should be in gmail.
Summaries
Gmail and Fluent email summaries both share the aim ‘to quickly understand you email threads at a glance’, but both do this in differnt ways/
Gmail summaries each email thread as a single line, with the first line of the last email next to the email subject
While for the active thread fluent summaries like:
This means you don’t have to open a thread to know what happening. You can quickly go through all your emails, just use the J key to auto go to the next email and fluent shows you the nice summary, press D to delete the thread, or J to go the next. This highlights fluent aim to make you do ‘triage’ on your email to sort it all out as quickly as possible
Missing features
Though fluent.io have worked hard to remove as much stuff from what we consider email theres 2 important features that work great in gmail that should be incorporated in fluent
Rapportive.com
Though not created by google the rapportive.com plugin for gmail is an essential add-on. Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
If fluent wants to be the future of email - its need this!
Send As
Another great feature of gmail is the support for multiple accounts. So you can easily redirect all the emails from your various accounts to 1 gmail account and gmail is smart enough to know when you reply to an email sent from a different account - to use that accounts details instead of the account your in
Fluent supports multiple accounts but their solution segregates the emails and it not what i’d expect from what they claim as ‘the future of email’
@fluent you need to make this ‘just work’ and not look like email of the past
Conclusion
I’m still using fluent as my main mail client - but need to go back into gmail for rapportive and multi account functions. Hopefully Fluent will sort these issues out.