So what is this Kukoo thing?

Basically, Kukoo helps you gain control over your inbox again. Aimed at power users, Kukoo will make you spend less time in your mailbox and more time doing those things you'd wanted/are supposed to do (both at work and at home). You decide when you'll be reading email and which of those messages will get priority.

How does that work?

As email clients are checking for new mail every few minutes and push email gets even more intrusive, we end up spending most of our (unproductive) workdays doing nothing but emailing. Although we may feel like we've been working our asses off, we basically did nothing at all. Not a good thing really.

Email today is sender-focused (see picture below). As an email receiver, you're destined to do just that: work your way through your inbox, without any possibility to decide what you'll be reading when.

Kukoo likes to approach email differently: by using our inbox like a real mailbox (you're not going outside every 10 minutes, are you?) and inspired by the concept of singletasking, we can save time to get that real work done. Kukoo will make sure people will know when to expect your reply, so they won't have to make those annoying followup phone calls or send that same email over and over again. In short: both sender and receiver will end up being happier.

Receiver in control

Kukoo brings the receiver back in control over the email flow. It's up to them to decide when they'll be checking their mail. You can log into your personal Kukoo account and set rules for each of your claimed addresses individually. Rules are created on a per-day basis, which means that for example you can check your mail early on Mondays and sleep in on Saturdays (or the other way round, of course).

Kukoo features an out-of-office (over)rule as well, allowing you to temporarily disable settings for one or more addresses and tell people you won't be reading at all.

Then why would an email sender use Kukoo?

Obviously, they don't have to. It's up to you as an email receiver to determine whether you'll be using Kukoo. There are however some clear advantages for senders to actively use Kukoo as well. While we're totally receiver-focused, we built in multiple reasons to make Kukoo as attractive as possible to email senders.

• Automatically receive an auto-reply message informing you when the receiver you just sent your email to will be checking their mail next time.
• Request that same message by sending an email to check@kukoo.com and the person whose status you want to check in the subject line.
• Show respect to people you're emailing and acknowlegde it's up to them to decide when they'll be replying to your mail. Think of it as some kind of email etiquette.
• Kukoo v2 will support automated rules based on who/how often someone is emailing. Using a receivers' Kukoo address will help a sender to become a popular contact.
• Join a worldwide movement turning email into a productivity tool again, rather than letting it kill your productivity.

Singletasking

We strongly believe in the idea of singletasking. While all the cool kids are going the multitasking way these days, singletasking suggests doing tasks one after each other, finishing the first before continuing to the next. Kukoo allows you to do just that: check your email at a predefined number of times a day and let your contacts know when you'll be doing so.

Roadmap

We've roadmapped a number of interesting features for future Kukoo releases (what you're currently using is only a first step). We originally launched in May 2009 as part of the IBBT Innovative and Creative Applications 09 contest. The current 1.1 release was launched in June 2009 and brings a number (over thirty) of usability and functionality improvements. We're continuing to make Kukoo smarter, planning the next major upgrade early July. The current 1.2 release was launched early July 2009, improving the public pages (and their stats) and introducing an all new IM bot (amongst others, obviously). We'll keep you up to date through our Dockyard blog.

Team

Kukoo is a Dockyard project, conceptualised and developed by Piet Jaspers and Tijs Vrolix. We get some much appreciated help from Openminds (hosting and DNS stuff) and Made by Elephant (icon).