On the iPhone app…

To chill a message in your inbox, pull down on the message to reveal additional options. Tap the arrow-icon. Click Chill Until… and then select a date when you’d like the conversation returned to your inbox. And it will be archived until that date. Out of sight, out of mind — until you’re ready for it to return!

You can also chill messages you send from your device. After composing your message, click the little grey pointer icon beside the character counter and choose “Chill Until…”

At Shortmail.com…

To chill a message in your inbox, click the arrow beside the “Archive” button. Choose “Chill for 7 days” or “Chill Until…” from the menu:

If you select “Chill until…”, a calendar will appear for you to specify the date you want the message to return to your inbox:

 
When sending a new shortmail you want to follow up on later, click Send & Chill Until…

Choose the date you want your sent message to reappear in your inbox:

So sometimes it can take a little bit of time to synchronize features across the front-end and back-end of a product. But when all of those efforts come together, it’s often very special.

The latest version of our Shortmail iOS App (1.5.0) represents such a convergence — of multiple efforts to move messaging forward, and we’re super-proud of what we’ve done here.

Here’s a quick tour.

Work Offline

Shortmail is about improving relationships by making communication easier. Many of us spend time traveling — on and off airplanes, in and out of subways, and in and out of network coverage.

Most mobile messaging apps don’t work well at all if network connectivity isn’t available (actually, they kind of freak out). We realized that this was an area where Shortmail could excel.

So Shortmail for iOS now has two standard modes of operation: online and offline. When you’re online, everything happens right away. You can receive new messages and send in real-time. But if you’re offline (think international flight, with 30 replies to send) you can queue up all your replies while in flight, and then seamlessly sync up when you land.

Not only are your replies synced up, but every operation you perform while offline is queued and synced to the server. We persist everything to your device’s local data store, so you don’t have to worry about losing your work.

Just load the app when you get back to a network and you’re set!

Let’s Chill…

Often, you want to clear something out of your inbox, but it would be great to get a reminder to return to it later. With Chill you can put something on ice until a date that you specify. And it couldn’t be easier.

Click Chill Until… and then select a date when you’d like the conversation returned to your inbox. And it will be archived until that date. Out of sight, out of mind — until you’re ready for it to return!

“Seen By” — Who’s Seen Each Message?

One of the advantages of Shortmail is that we track when each message has been seen by each person in a conversation.

And on our latest iOS app, you can see this information really simply: just slide an individual message to the right to reveal when each person saw each post. So the next time you’re wondering why someone hasn’t replied, you can at least see when (or if) they have seen your post. More information, simply presented.

Also, you’ll notice that each message you send to others has a small triangle in the lower right corner. If it’s filled in gray, it’s been seen by all recipients. If it’s only partially filled in, not everyone has seen it yet. So you can quickly eyeball a conversation to get a sense of whether a message has made the rounds yet.

Robust Search

We know that most people use messaging as a kind of “brain backup,” and while we’ve had local search capabilities in Shortmail for iOS since the beginning, we wanted it to be more robust.

Now you can search for anything in Shortmail, and if it’s not available locally, you can continue the search on the server — with fast results!

And there’s more…

There are actually a couple of additional features in this latest release which we’ll be talking about more in the next few days, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we would love to hear your feedback about this latest iOS release.

Among other things, we’ve worked really hard to make the app robust (doggedly hunting down memory leaks and other sources of crashes) to make for a rock-solid experience. We also made public and open conversations more visible and easier to use.

I’m David Troy, CEO of 410 Labs and Product Manager for our iOS application. Send me a Shortmail and let me know how you think we can make Shortmail better and more useful!

Shortmail for iOS Version 1.5.0

The new feature is live at Shortmail.com, and coming soon to the Shortmail iPhone app. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

But it turns out, lots of people contacted us saying that they love Shortmail, but they don’t love their Twitter name and could we open things up so they could chose a better name. So we did.

Today, we are announcing the opening of Shortmail.me, a sister service to Shortmail.com. It’s fully interoperable and has all the same great features as Shortmail.com. Plus it has a brand new, wide open name space. So people can go ahead and create a Shortmail.me account with any valid name (respecting the rights of others of course.)

So go to Shortmail.me and claim the name that best represents you or your business.  Or use the Shortmail iPhone app, which has been updated to make it even easier to sign up and start using Shortmail.

You can read the full announcement at 410 Labs.

And as always, please let us know what you think.

Neil Boyd, one of our favorite beta users, recently video blogged how to use Dropbox and Sparrow to “send” an attachment over Shortmail. We love it!

Neil points out that all links embedded in a Shortmail message are shortened using our own link shortener, http://shml.me/. It’s true that you can play ‘link roulette’, seeing what links others are sharing on our site (you can also do this with bit.ly, and t.co). Since Dropbox links are often private (and obfuscated), this increases the possibility that the Shortmail/Dropbox user’s file is exposed to others.

Earlier today, we added a fix to our system so that Dropbox public urls are never shortened by our url shortener.

Now you can send Dropbox urls over Shortmail without the risk of having them available through yet another obsfucated url. And since the recently-released Sparrow 1.5 makes it so easy to use Dropbox to “attach” files to email, we hope our Shortmail users will continue to use these tools to communicate in ways that matter to them.

How do you prefer to “attach” files to Shortmail messages? What can we do to make it even easier for you?

This is an exciting day for the Shortmail team! Since this summer, we’ve been working on creating a new Shortmail experience: Shortmail for iOS. It ships today, and we’re excited for you to try it and see what you think.

With the Shortmail app, we really feel like we’ve created something entirely new, and we are just getting started. Here are some of the app highlights:

• Instantly converts Twitter accounts into Shortmail accounts. Using the Twitter integration in iOS 5 (which is required), we instantly convert your Twitter accounts into Shortmail accounts. No hassle, no signups, no passwords. It “just works.”
• New messages delivered instantly – via push notification! Get instant, SMS-like notification of new Shortmails — no IMAP, no special configuration required. With Shortmail, email has a “first class” push mechanism, directly to you.
• View conversations, not messages. Conventional mobile email clients show you individual messages – out of context. Shortmail is all about communicating with people and puts each new message in its proper place. More like text messaging, less like email – still compatible with any email address!
• Support for multiple accounts. Having multiple Shortmail accounts is easy. Just add a new Twitter account and it’s automatically added to Shortmail!
• More signal, less noise. Shortmail’s 500 character limit is long enough to express a complex idea, but short enough to ensure concise, clear communication.

Arturo Vergara

@shortmail Your service is genius! I love it! I also especially love IMAP and POP, very handy with the iDevices

Yossi Gofman

As of the publication of this tweet I strongly, but strongly prefer mail items sent to me over shortmail. They will be on the top of my read

 

Cole Lyman

@shortmail is to poetry as email is to prose

Donald iljazi

@shortmail I am a Web Designer and I am really into the UI. The features and the idea are both the best. Keep on rocking. #bestemailever

 

Jaison De Montalegre

Just installed the @shortmail widget on my site! Great little add-on, got rid of the contact page entirely.

Vijayendra Mohanty

No more contact page. Just add the “Shortmail Me!” widget to your blog sidebar. See it in action on my blog. http://bit.ly/oOYFbE

Dr.W

Shortmail is the perfect addition to my minimalistic tools of communication.

“Shortmail is the perfect SMS substitute” (private communication).

See also Dr.W’s GOODBYE SMS — HELLO SHORTMAIL

 

Vaneeesa Blaylock

@ijustine YOU aren’t on @shortmail yet??? Oh my! This IS a great disturbance in the cloud! 

Clay Cauley

Ahh @shortmail… how I love your simplicity. Prospective client emails are much easier to handle now!

 

Amit Chopra

@shortmail is freakin awesome . .

Josh Crain

Last night I had a dream @shortmail could be embedded in a website. Son of a gun: http://getsatisfaction.com/shortmail/topics/add_the_shortmail_me_widget_to_your_site

Akar Gosrani

@shortmail thats why they are awesome.

Anything simple always catches my mind. For egs: Tumblr, Twitter, Evernote, Shortmail, Stumbleupon. Simplicity. It always works.

 

Nick Rovisa

Totally in love with @Shortmail. Want to get in touch with me? Shortmail me: nickrovisa@shortmail.com

Paul Papadimitriou 

“The shortmail app has been upgraded to my first iPhone screen a minute ago ”  (private communication)

Texting requires phone numbers. You need their number, and they need yours. Thankfully, Shormtail doesn’t work that way. With Shortmail, all either party needs is a Twitter username. And unlike Direct Messaging, you can send a Shortmail to someone who is not following you. You can think of Shortmail as DM done right!

2. A public address

To publish your texting-address is to publish your phone number. That’s a lot to ask.

Your Shortmail address is your Twitter username (@shortmail.com), which is already public. Many Shortmailers add their Shortmail addresses directly into their Twitter bios and replace their blogs’ Contact Me pages with a Shortmail Me widget.

3. A searchable archive

Mobile services often treat your texts as disposable. Not only is there a cap on how big your archive can be, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to search. By contrast, Shortmail keeps your shortmails in a limitless, searchable archive at Shortmail.com.

4. Public conversations

You can’t text publicly. SMS simply doesn’t operate as a public platform. Shortmail, on the other hand, lets you hold a public conversation for the world and Web to view.

5. Open conversations

What we just said in #4, plus the ability to open up your public conversation for anyone on the Web to participate in. The forum-like atmosphere that a Shortmail open conversation provides is unheard of in the realm of SMS.

6. More asynchronous than SMS, more synchronous than email

Texting tends to imply urgency, while email tends to imply delay. Shortmail stands between these two extremes as a happy (messaging) medium. Use it as needed for real-time messaging or for longer-term interaction.

7. Better support for groups than SMS

Group texting is a pain. Holding group conversations in Shortmail, by contrast, is simple. When starting a new conversation, just enter multiple emails or Twitter usernames into the “To” field. All replies go to the group.

8. Free!

Texting costs money. You pay per message, or you pay for a usage plan. Either way, you pay. Shortmail, on the other hand, is free.

9. Email: the world’s largest messaging network

While the reach of SMS is great, the reach of email is even greater. Email is the world’s largest messaging network. You can send a shortmail to absolutely anyone with an email address.

10. An extra 340 characters

In the words of Shortmail user Dr.W:

Shortmail is the perfect SMS substitute. Instead of having a limit of 160 characters, you will instead be able to send longer messages, with a 500 character limit. And who wants to type more than 500 characters on a mobile phone?

• Inbox = forum
• Email conversation = forum thread
• New message = new topic
• Sender = Poster
• Recipients = participants

And so on…

Of course, the one difference — privacy — matters enormously. So while letting users go public with their email conversations, we also added prominent tools and loud-and-clear indicators to keep the divide between public and private crystal clear.

Here is a striking example of someone using Shortmail open conversations to break free of the inbox. oVan wanted Suggestions to improve CSS support in @mkristensen’s WebEssentials for VS2010. By using Shortmail open conversations to gather those suggestions, he could not only reach out to specific people, but to the Web as a whole. Better still, he could publish the conversation for posterity, while also tracking it in his inbox.

Make no mistake, this is an actual, card-carrying email, with sender, recipients and email addresses for all of them. oVan sent it from his inbox and its showing up in his recipients’ inboxes. But it’s also a real, bona fide forum thread, with a URL, a public stream, a social menu and a reply box that anyone can use. oVan can find it in his inbox, and he can also find it on Google. Here’s his take on it:

I like the fact that you can have an open discussion without resorting to forums and their dreaded registration process. It’s also much better than doing this on Twitter where replies are full of @usernames instead of meaningful content.

So next time you’re about to have an email conversation where nothing private is at stake, don’t confine it to your inbox. Set it free. Let it be a snowball gathering up new replies from around the Web. Choose “public” or “open” and publish it for posterity!

1. As your public-facing email address  

On your Twitter Bio: Many Shortmailers, like Jerry Daniels, Dr.W, Chris Gingerich, Donald iljazi and Cole Lyman are publishing their Shortmail addresses directly into their Twitter bios.

As a replacement for your blog’s Contact Me page:

Shortmail Me is a small lightweight script that can be installed on any website (Tumblr, WordPress confirmed) that enables visitors to quickly and easily send a Shortmail to the embedded user. Just copy and paste the code, change the target user name to your own and off you go.

–  Jaison De Montalegre, Shortmail Introduces “Shortmail Me!”

 2. To keep yourself (and others) concise

If you’re struggling to keep emails brief so you can spend more time working and less time writing messages, you might want to check out ShortMail… to keep you answering emails quickly with as few words as possible.

– Lifehacker, Shortmail forces you to write shorter, simpler emails to keep you productive

3. As a companion to Sparrow

As you probably know, I hate email. But I love Sparrow. And I love Shortmail. The two services are attempting to alleviate the pain that is email in two different ways. Sparrow makes email pretty. Shortmail makes email short. Today, the two are teaming up.

– M.G. Siegler, Techcrunch, Sparrow And Shortmail Team Up To Silence Verbose Email

4. As an alternative to SMS and DMs

Now that most mobile phones have email and 3G capabilities, Shortmail is the perfect SMS substitute. Instead of having a limit of 160 characters, you will instead be able to send longer messages, with a 500 character limit, which will most likely cost you less than that too-short SMS. And who wants to type more than 500 characters on a mobile phone?

– Dr. W. See also Dr. W’s GOODBYE SMS — HELLO SHORTMAIL

Think of Shortmail as the Twitter direct message on steroids. Threaded and able to be sent to several different recipients.

– Jaison De Montalegre, The @Shortmail Revolution

5. As a public platform

Shortmailers are using Shortmail’s public/open option to start discussions, make public announcements, hold public meetings and expand Tweets.

How do you use Shortmail? We want to know!

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