Shortmail Launches As A Lifeline To Drowning In Your Email Inbox

Frank Gruber Jun 29, 2011 Tweet

Looking to make email communications more focused and pleasant, Shortmail, which we covered previously, has come out of private beta today. Since we previously covered Shortmail’s private beta in March, the 410 Labs team lead by Matthew Koll and David Troy has added the ability to send public as well as private messages. So when you compose a Shortmail, you now have the choice of making it public – meaning that the conversation is visible to the world, although only the named participants can chime in on the note.

The email-like service is hooked to Twitter to offer a new way to communicate your more long-winded messages. It has a length-limit of 500 characters and is social – meaning your messages are public in nature. So if you are into airing your dirty laundry on Twitter and need more characters or want to keep your private and professional messages more concise, Shortmail might be a good way to go. According to Matthew Koll:

“longer than Twitter, shorter than most email, and social when you want it to be.  Public conversations are a new take on the old concept of a letter to the editor or sending an open letter to someone.”

Shortmail was developed in response to the movement towards short email, which also brought about such products as Three Sentences Email where you only respond in 3 sentences or less. It has also drawn inspiration from Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED Conference, as he called for an Email Charter, to help us all from drowning in our email inbox.