Xoopit Team Blog

Feedback to Features

Since our private beta launch, you've sent us great feedback. We converted the most popular requests and issues to new features on Xoopit. Here you go:

• People love seeing things by person (i.e. email address). We now made it easier when viewing media to quickly see what a given person has sent you. Just type in the box labeled Who. Once you are viewing stuff from a person, you can just click on their name to switch to someone else.



• You asked for more control of over sorting and filtering different views. Each of Photos, Videos and Files, now contain a View By field. This is particularly useful for Files. You can now filter to a given type whether you are searching for Word docs or any music file.



• After doing a search, when we suggest names, we now include email addresses (instead of just names).
• Video thumbnails now have titles.
• The great "hide" vs. "delete" debate has been settled. "Delete" wins! Note, that deleting from Xoopit does not delete the picture from Gmail. You can do this when hovering over a photo or video (see pic below) or when looking at an individual photo or video.



• You can disable email from Xoopit in settings.
• When using the Firefox plugin, if you log in as a different Gmail (or Google Apps) user, we log you out from Xoopit. In other words if you are happily using Gmail + Xoopit and then your sister comes over to check her Gmail account on your computer, she won't see those embarrassing pictures your friends sent you from the weekend.

So what do you think? Please send us feedback. We're constantly tuning the product for you!

Google15, meet the Xoopit-10

Yesterday, Anupreeta Das from Reuters came by with Kim Milosevic from Outcast PR to share some lentil soup and salad with us. It was a typical day at Xoopit, buzzing with ideas. Preeta and Kim slurped soup as Peter, Rob, Woody, and Jules talked about some clever new fetching and indexing tricks to make onboarding 1000's of new users simultaneously a whole lot faster.

Google 15, meet the Xoopit 10. Yummy, nourishing, and wholesome... Thanks Preeta!
Preeta's post on the Xoopit 10.

Send us email at lunch@xoopit.com. We would love to hear from you!

FOOD AS FUEL

Lucene extensibility. [OH YEAH] Extraction throughput. [GIVE IT TO ME] Ginger lemon tea?! [ahhhhh....]

Our Monday morning team meetings at Xoopit cover a range of topics from code to colo's, but we also discuss something that isn't a common theme of discussion in the tech culture--FOOD AS FUEL.

Yes, what we eat at Xoopit for lunch is a delicate and rather important matter and we enjoy giving it some thought. Since our move to our current office location in march of 2007, we've been committed to creating a healthy environment for our team, starting with the food that we put in our bodies during work hours.

It all began when Peter came to drop off his offer letter while we were still working out of Bijan's apartment in Bernal Heights. Peter joked about bringing a brown bag for lunch since we did not yet have a 4 star organic cafeteria. Unbeknownst to him, a regime of organic, low carb, and mostly vegetarian meals were already a part of Bijan & JK's lunch time culture (with the occasional jaunt to Ritual Roasters after lunch).

Today with a team of 10, we continue to eat lunch together every day of the week in our Mission District office. In building our company together, we have discovered that healthy, energizing food can have all of our favorite flavors and textures and we enjoy preparing lunches designed to wake us up rather than have us crave for a siesta. While hearing stories that at some companies people have gained 15lbs from all the free food, at Xoopit, a few of us have lost 10lbs, are eating smarter, and are always bursting with new ideas to take to our users.

On our lunch table, you will find curried lentils, baked fish, great salads of all kinds....And then there are the soups, from tomato to miso, broccoli, and even firey ginger-carrot.

When you go through our fridge or kitchen shelves, you come across super foods like raw almond butter, E3live, macca or vitamineral green powder, goji berries and fresh raw almond milk-- And o.k we won't pretend that we don't all run for the organic dark chocolate bar sitting on the counter in the afternoon but that's a vice that we're happy to keep!

Add us to your blog reader or check back from time-to-time, as we will post our favorite recipes!

Ignore that last email...

You may have just received an email from Xoopit saying "Xoopit is not currently able to communicate with your mail service." Gmail had a blip today in their IMAP support. Unfortunately this triggered an over aggressive communication with you, our users.

We want to reduce email clutter. We do not like when we mistakenly send you a message. Our apologies.

First, there is nothing you did wrong and nothing you need to do. Once Gmail is fixed we'll automatically start working again.

Second, we are fixing our communication system with you so we aren't so quick to notify you of issues communicating with Gmail.

Thanks again for you support and feedback in our beta!

First Week of Xoopit for Gmail

Huge thanks to everyone who signed up during week one! We’ve received great feedback. Please keep sending in the suggestions, writing blog comments and twittering away. You’re actively helping shape the future of Xoopit.

For those who didn’t get into the beta yet, we will be opening up more invites shortly. The flood of users pointed out a few places in our system that need some performance tuning. We want to make sure folks come on and get a great experience.

We focused hard on solving some key everyday use cases for the mail experience. It is clearly resonating with users. Here is what some folks have said.

“I really like it. It has a shot at making my Gmail experience a bit more fun. My view is simple: 90 percent my text emails boring work stuff, and the standard Gmail experience is a decent solve there. 99 percent of my pictures and videos in my email are from friends, and are what I look at for entertainment. Xoopit takes the fun stuff and makes is easy to navigate, respond to, and pass on (kind of paraphrasing what they highlighted as their focus, which is OK, since it did capture what I felt).” - Jammer

“been using xoopit gmail addon and really like that I have 1-click access to all my attachments now" - MetaWeb20

“xoopit is cooler than expected, esp like viewing albums in mail, found old stuff” - jkuramot

“xoopit = extreme awesomeness” - mattharman

“Xoopit has become my virtual filesystem.  I've stopped downloading and managing my attachments.” - Laurent M. (via email)

“It's like a wonder bra for your inbox.”  - Angel S. (via email)

“Xoopit is starting small, but I can without a doubt say they’re onto something. If this kind of presentation and interaction isn’t the future of e-mail, then I’m not sure what is. Frankly, I’m surprised no one’s thought of this idea before — it seems obvious after Xoopit that social networks have undoubtedly mastered the “here’s your life” user interface, and there is a whole world to conquer with e-mail in this respect. I certainly hope with their $5 million round they’re able to get somewhere with this concept, because this is how I want to live through my e-mail, darnit!” - Rev2.org

“I must say Xoopit is off to a really great start. For a new app, I found very little to gripe about. It succeeds in two major areas: one in speed, since it doesn't slow down your in-box whatsoever, and the other in ease of use. The user interface is incredibly intuitive and provides a far better media viewing experience than Gmail does on its own.” - Webware

And finally one internal quote from Priya, who cooks amazing lunches for us everyday: "I can't stop giggling at the fact that I've never heard the word PUSH so many times in one day. You sounded like mothers in labor and now the baby is out. PHEW!"

That was a good espresso

Thanks again for your patience. We're back up.

Quick afternoon coffee break

Just letting folks know we need to take a quick bit of downtime. Thanks for your patience with us! Demand has been overwhelming and we are doing our best to allow new users in while preserving experience for users already who are already on board.

How Xoopit Manages Your Data

Xoopit is an email based service founded to give you more control over your information.

We are committed to giving you an outstanding product that you can trust. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect your information.

In the spirit of keeping an open and transparent dialogue with our users, here are the answers to the most common questions on how we manage your data that came up today.

Question #1: Why do you need my Gmail email address and password?
In order for us to index all the interesting stuff in your email, we talk to Gmail via secure IMAP. You can think of us like a big Outlook or iPhone talking to Gmail in the sky. We would love it if there was a way to get at mail content without requiring your Google credentials -- i.e. AuthSub for IMAP (see this post).  We will support these APIs as the webmail providers make them available to us.

Question #2: What do you do with my password?
We currently use industry best practices to encrypt and store this data. We also have a rigorous internal policy to ensure your data is not tampered with. Finally, all communications with Gmail are done securely (secure IMAP and SMTP for you techies). This is no different from what happens when you login into Gmail yourself from a web browser, an iPhone or Outlook. All uses of your password are secure.

Question #3: Do you store a copy of my email?
We currently index and store a copy of your email on our servers so that we can help you discover new things lost in your inbox as we add new indexing features, like support for Facebook messages.

Question #4: Will you delete my account if I ask?
Yes, we will in 24 to 48 hours. No ifs, ands or buts. That said, please send us feedback.

Lastly a tip: https support
You may browse our service over https for an enhanced secure browsing experience in the same way that users can use Gmail over https.

We are strong believers in transparency. If you have any questions, please comment here or send us mail at feedback@xoopit.com.

We are back up

Thanks for your patience!

Quick maintenance break

Thanks for the huge volume of interest! Try as we did to avoid this, we got a tremendous number of signups in the last hour and need to do a quick maintenance to keep things humming again. We'll be back up in a jiffy.