You, like many people, probably have an unread email count that’s bigger than the crowds at Lollapalooza 2021. That’s because email sucks. It is weirdly formal, bloated with spam, and sloooooow. 🐢 With zero control over who emails you or how often they do, it’s easy to get MAJOR anxiety 😱 from that nagging, red badge.🔴
But communicating should be FUN, 🥳 not drudgery or panic-inducing.
Email as it exists now—and has for more than 40 years—is objectively terrible. 👎 But illumy is reinventing how email works. 👍
problem 1: composing an email is awkward, if you think about it
With email, speed is a big issue. You have to write a subject line, a salutation, a closing, etc. If you’re like us, those parts take you longer to write than the actual message you’re trying to convey. That’s not communication. That’s forced formality—and for what? It doesn’t improve clarity or convey your message faster. In fact, this structure, we’d argue, impedes efficient communication. 🗣
problem 2: waiting for a response takes too long
Think about the last really good conversation you had (in person, on the phone, over video, whatever). It had rapid back-and-forth: sharing news, swapping stories, having a laugh,🤣 and that familiar dance of pausing, interrupting, resuming. In other words, conversations happen at the pace of life.
Email works for formal communications or if you need a paper trail. But for talking to real live humans, it just can’t keep up.
problem 3: email isn’t safe or secure—at all
The basic structure of email and how it’s sent is pretty old-school—so, unlike more modern forms of communication, security 🔐 isn’t built in automatically. As soon as you hit “Send” on an email, it goes from one server to another and another, and each server has its own security protocols, so you’re at the mercy of the server owner.
Then there’s the issue of your personal data. Many email platforms not only comb through your email (the content of your messages and the recipients) to target you with ads—but they also SELL this info to other, even less scrupulous third parties.
Your data should be yours—not up for sale to the highest bidder.
problem 4: email is too limiting
If slow speeds and shoddy security weren’t bad enough, there’s the experience of writing email. For an aristocrat 🎩 in the 18th century—when letter-writing 📝was all the rage—email would have been perfect. For us modern folks, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Writing an email is kind of like posting on Facebook. Want to create a wall of text and wait hours for a response? Great! Want something approximating an actual conversation—with gifs, reactions, memes, and emojis faster than any email service available today? Well, too bad (unless you’re on illumy—but we’ll get to that in a minute).
And don’t even get us started about sharing files over email. They get buried ⚰️ deep in your inbox (which you inevitably find yourself furiously searching through later, scanning messages for that attachment icon📎). Attachments have to be downloaded to be viewed. And they may not send at all, since most email providers limit attachment sizes to around 20MB. Twenty megs? In 2021? Seriously?
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Email is, in short, due for an update. We deserve email that’s as fast ⚡️ as IM. Email that is encrypted, end-to-end. Email that doesn’t allow ads or scrape your data. Email that allows attachments up to 500 MB. Even better, what if your email app offered chat, voice, and video for free and gave you a phone number and international calling at a very low price?
We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we built illumy. It’s fast. It’s 100% free and ad-free, and you can add calling for as little as $3 (totally optional). The future is here, and it’s illumy.
Sign up for free today!
