It started off with people leaving text files with messages on each other's server space.
Over time, the process of sending and receiving emails became more streamlined and people took to copying each other on emails to loop in interested stakeholders. The unmissable message here is that if you give a group of people a tool, any tool, they will find a way to use it to communicate with each other.
Later, monopolistic (in practice, if not legally) companies started gatekeeping our access to email. Innovation stalled and instead of expanding the myriad ways emails can be used, they sent us on a wild goose chase towards Inbox Zero - as if the only purpose of email were to run like hamsters on a treadmill of reading and responding to demands.
PretzelBox is here to change that.
Our first goal was to unshackle email from the single-user/single email address model which, while lucrative to sellers of email services, was not the only way email could be used. The PretzelBox inbox was born out of that.
Next, we turned towards using email in unique ways. Using it for blogging and to store files was a natural progression. Of late, we are also using emails to generate HTML pages.
For example, even this About page itself is generated from an email.
But we aren't stopping here.
We have a whole host of things we can use emails for. We can, for instance, use it to
- manage business continuity through a shared inbox
- share downloadable digital content
- capture and display testimonials
- capture website inputs (like formspree.io)
- programmatically execute test cases
PretzelBox is re-imagining email inboxes and that's what this is all about.