Hello! We wanted to let you know about three exciting new products that we’ve just launched:
First, a work-focused AI voice assistant that actually helps you get stuff done. It can summarize and extract tasks from your important emails and reschedule meetings. It can find the exact message you need from eight months ago, delete all the marketing email you got yesterday, and even help you find and set aside exactly the amount of time you need to clear out your Inbox. It does it all instantly. And it’s 100% powered by AI, not by people reading your emails. Most people who use Siri and Alexa use them for playing songs, looking up Wikipedia articles, and telling dad jokes. This one is cut from a different cloth.
Second, you now have a user-friendly, elegant, and simple way to use Boomerang on your iPhone. Having Boomerang in your pocket has been your most popular request over the last few years. We took our time answering it, because we wanted to make sure we got it right. Now you can use all the features from Boomerang that you need to be productive (follow-up reminders, schedule messages to send later) and relaxed (pause incoming email, snooze what you don’t need today) on the go. We hope you’ll agree it was worth the wait.
And finally, we’re excited to share with you the best email app for the iPhone that we could build. It’s beautiful. It’s fast. It supports threads, labels, drafts, notifications, the works. It comes with an intuitive new gesture system that’s the fastest, most accurate way to triage your messages – and we’ve done the research to back that up. It has a brand new search experience that makes finding anything in your Inbox a snap. We even spent time thinking deeply about secondary experiences like copying email addresses and finding phone numbers, and we’ve made them all easy. One of the things that makes the iPhone great is its focus on getting all the details right, and we’ve done our best to live up to those standards.
So three new products… If you watched Steve Jobs introducing the original iPhone, you already know the big reveal: these three new products are all included in one new app.
We’re delighted to introduce Boomerang for iPhone. The best email app we could build on the iPhone, with everything you’ve come to rely on from Boomerang, plus the world’s first AI voice assistant that helps you get your work done.
You can get it right away, or read on for more! You can also chat with us about Boomerang for iPhone on Product Hunt.
The best email app we could build
We’re barely able to contain our enthusiasm for all of the exciting features that we’ve added to the email experience. But most of the time, email apps are used for reading, finding, organizing, and writing messages. So let’s start there.
We’ve worked hard to make Boomerang a great core email app. It’s fast – messages load in the background as notifications arrive, and if you go offline, we deliver the data compressed and ordered so that your time-to-first-message will be the shortest of any email app. It’s polished and beautiful, with enough color to catch your eye, but not enough to distract you from the content of your messages. Standards are high for everyday apps, so every pixel was thoughtfully placed.
We’ve made it easy to tidy up a messy Inbox on the go. Boomerang includes a new gesture system that is both faster and more reliable than anything else we’ve seen. Swipe right to Archive (or customize this to Delete or Mark as Read instead), then swipe left for everything else.
We’re hoping that changes, starting today. The voice assistant we’ve built into Boomerang is built around a different philosophy. Instead of having forced conversations with a fake person on your phone that tries to do too much of everything, Boomerang simplifies complicated, headache-inducing processes into just a few words. It doesn’t play music or tell you when George Clooney was born (George, if you’re reading this, you’re looking good for 56!), but it does a lot of things that, before today, you either had to do yourself or hire an assistant to do. Here are a few of our favorites.
Note: If you’re trying out voice commands this week, please wait 15-20 seconds in between each command so our servers don’t catch on fire. If you see Invalid Command, that means your voice server is overloaded, so take a break and try again in a few minutes!
Coming out of a meeting, a flight, or just waking up? Try asking Boomerang to Brief Me.
Boomerang gives you an overview of everything you need from your email and calendar, all in one place! Check your schedule so you know where you need to go, and when you need to get there. Boomerang shows you actionable summaries of important messages that need a response from you (no marketing junk), with enough context for you to know how to respond. Finally, Boomerang uses machine learning to calculate how much work is waiting for you in your email. Just tap the Email Forecast square, and we’ll help you find time in your schedule to clear your Inbox.
Got a last minute change to your schedule? Ask Boomerang to Reschedule my meeting with Roger. Boomerang will draft an email for you that lets others know you can’t make it and instantly suggests some times that could work to reschedule. Look it over, press send, and you’re all set.
Overloaded Inbox? Try Delete all the marketing email I got yesterday. Clear out the clutter effortlessly and instantly, so you only keep emails you need. Scan the list so you don’t accidentally lose something important, tap confirm, and voila! Or, ask What emails do I need to reply to? and you’ll see only the messages where someone you care about is asking for something from you.
You can also use our newest feature, Inbox Pause, from your phone. Ask Boomerang to Pause my inbox until tomorrow morning. Reclaim hours of lost productivity, create time for focused work, and reduce stress by stopping interruptions. New messages won’t appear in your Inbox until you say so. Studies show that limiting email interruptions can boost your IQ by 10 points or more, give you 40 extra minutes a day to work, and reduce stress by as much as adopting a meditation practice.
We mentioned that Boomerang has powerful new search features up above — they’re here too. Find me emails with photos from last June. What’s Cody’s phone number? What’s Emily’s address? Boomerang’s assistant supports the advanced search features you can’t get anywhere else, like finding phone numbers and addresses of people who’ve emailed you but aren’t in your contacts. Find exactly what you’re looking for, without even having to type!
Don’t want to tap before you talk? Enable keyphrase mode in Settings, and just say Hey Boomerang to activate the assistant. When keyphrase mode is on, you can ask Siri to Open Boomerang and go straight in. You can also access several voice commands, plus a handy note-to-self mode, by 3D touching on the app icon.
For a long list of commands that we support, check out the FAQ page. Don’t worry about memorizing the exact command – the language processing engine is smart enough to disambiguate between different ways to say the same thing. So “Find me emails from Jamie.” and “What emails do I have from Jamie?” will both do the right thing.
And there’s a lot more coming. Stay tuned for new commands, including the best handsfree mode you’ve ever seen, built with a distributed machine learning architecture we can’t wait to talk about.
Small screen, all of Boomerang.
Swipe left or open a message, and the Boomerang icon is right there. Tap Compose, and you’ll see Send Later and a bell icon that lets you add a reminder to follow up if you don’t get a reply. Ask Boomerang to “pause my Inbox until tomorrow morning” and you won’t see any new email, even on your desktop, until then. One caveat: read receipts, Respondable, and recurring messages are all still in development. They’re coming soon, so hang in there!
Q&A
How much does Boomerang cost?
Boomerang for iPhone is free, and will remain free to use while it’s in beta. We’re funded by subscriptions, so if you like the app, we encourage you to support us by using and purchasing a subscription for the web-based product!
This looks amazing, but I’m on Android! When’s the Android app coming?
It’s already here! Boomerang’s Android app is available in the Play Store:
Our Android app is a full mail app that includes all of Boomerang’s features right where you’d expect them! It’s powerful, fast, and well-reviewed. It doesn’t yet have the voice assistant or some of the other features we mentioned above, but we’ve got big plans for it in 2018. Want to help us build it? We’re hiring!
Does the app support Archiving, Deleting, Labels, Search, Attachments, Conversation View, Drafts, Multiple Accounts, and Notifications?
Yes to all!
Can I use this with my other email accounts?
You can use Boomerang for iPhone with Gmail, G Suite, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, and Microsoft Exchange email accounts. Support for iCloud, Yahoo, AOL and other accounts that provide IMAP access are on our roadmap, though they are not supported today.
Does Boomerang work with languages other than English?
All of the app text and the voice assistant features are only in English right now. Everything will work correctly even if you have Gmail set to use a different language, though. We are working on adding full support for other languages, so please stay tuned.
What does the “Email Forecast” mean in Brief Me?
Boomerang uses machine learning to estimate how long it will take you to go through the messages in your Inbox. Tap that square to schedule time to do it! Some of the most important factors it takes into account for each message are action items and requests, the length and complexity of the language used in the message, and your relationship with the message sender.
I use Boomerang inside Gmail on the web. Why did you build a whole app on the iPhone?
Building our own app was an easy decision. There isn’t a way to build Boomerang’s features as an add-on to the native mail app or other mail apps in iOS. Building our own app also lets us build a much better experience for you – we can bring things like our new gesture swipe system and voice assistant to life. We hope we’ve built a good enough app that you won’t miss your old one.
Are you working on…?
Probably! There are a lot more things we wanted to build, but we couldn’t keep you waiting any longer. But we are far from done. We’re working just as hard on making the app amazing today as we were before we launched. Some things that are on our roadmap: Unified Inbox, faster initial search results, support for Gmail’s Categories and Outlook’s Focused Inbox, more mail providers, iPad and Apple Watch support, sorting by unread state, and more. Want to request a specific feature? Send us a note, and we’ll add it to our queue. Or connect with us on Product Hunt!
How do I send you feedback or bug reports?
We love email! Please feel free to email us at support+iphone@baydin.com with feedback, issues, or questions.
I’ve been waiting for this FOREVER. To what deity should I dedicate my sacrifice in gratitude this winter solstice?
😶
I made it all the way to the end! Can you give me one more download button?
Of course!
Thanks for reading! We know we’re not the first iPhone mail client to arrive, but we’re aiming to be the last one you’ll ever need to download. And thanks to your support, we’ve been at it for seven years; we’re not going anywhere. Please let us know how the app is working for you, and send us suggestions about what you want to see next in the app!
Love helping people be more productive? We’re hiring engineers, marketers, product managers, and more!
