Email is good.

Paul Kinlan has made some email-focused mini products lately and wonders why it’s not more common.

I’ve built services that Summarize the newsletters for me; provides a critique of the email; generates images based on a subject; Sends newsletters and PDF’s to my reMarkable; A service that fetches web pages for me; A service that reminds me at certain times… the list goes on.

While I build these tools, I just don’t see many services built on the back of email as an interface. Friendfeed was one of the first services that I vividly remember letting you perform actions via email and Google App Engine also had an inbound email handler (long-since deprecated), there are perilously few services that I can find that are built off the back of this communication modality.

I would guess we don’t see email services productized as much as:

1. It’s taken as a given. The service does a thing and if output is a part of it, email is just one of the places it can go, not the ONE place it can go.
2. People don’t like email anymore, so even if it would be useful, paying to get more of it doesn’t feel good to them.

A recent example though I can think of is Sill, which is awesome. It does digests of social media activity. But I admit, I consume it through the RSS output not the Email output, which feels better to me.