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Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce a

Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.

cm2012 11y ago
What do you not like about Outlook or Gmail (I think the market leaders)?
- zyxley 11y ago
  The "delay for later" feature is tremendously useful compared to traditional inbox handling. Of course, to trust that feature, it also has to be tremendously reliable, and that's the biggest thing that Mailbox got right in the first place. That's also why it very handily beat out Mail Pilot, which had the same idea and got started earlier but to this day is still filled with terrible bugs.
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  They don't work with other people's IMAP/POP3 servers? (Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)
  - msh 11y ago
    Gmail for Android supports third party pop\imap servers quite well.
  - cbhl 11y ago
    The GMail Android app does work with other people's IMAP and POP3 servers, for what it's worth. But then you have to use Android. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en
  - cwyers 11y ago
    Outlook supports IMAP, not POP3. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-email-on-iPhone-iPad-or-iPod-Touch-b2de2161-cc1d-49ef-9ef9-81acd1c8e234#BKMK_IMAPorPOP https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-email-on-iPh...
    - zimpenfish 11y ago
      Ah, good to know, thanks.
- jarin 11y ago
  It's such a pain to process hundreds of emails in Outlook, and there's no snoozing like there is with Mailbox or Inbox.
  - mdeeks 11y ago
    Outlook does have snooze/scheduling. Just curious, how is processing hundreds of emails in Mailbox or Inbox better than Outlook? Seems like trying to do that on a mobile device would be hard no matter what app.
- ketralnis 11y ago
  I'm not the parent but Outlook's IMAP support is quirky at best and I very strongly prefer native applications to web applications. I also host my own email which marks gmail right out. Email should be simple but there has been essentially no lasting innovation in email clients in a very long time unless you really want Google to host it for you
- xxpor 11y ago
  Outlook (I assume you're referring to the mobile app, not the desktop client) puts all of your emails on MS's servers, so that's a no go for lots of people. Last I checked, the gmail app only worked with gmail accounts.
  - threatofrain 11y ago
    The Gmail app actually allows 3rd-party IMAP connections.
    - gcr 11y ago
      Do you mean gmail's web interface? That works by downloading your emails from your 3rd-party IMAP connections into Gmail's server.
      - NeutronBoy 11y ago
        No, he means the 'Gmail' app (on Android phones at least, not sure about iPhones) allows third part servers. They rolled the Mail client into it.
- schneidmaster 11y ago
  Gmail on mobile still doesn't have a unified inbox, and it also doesn't have features I've come to depend on such as snoozing messages. I usually use Inbox by Gmail on mobile, which also lacks a unified inbox and (bizarrely enough) support for HTML signatures but does have pretty good message snoozing, and I like how it handles bundling. Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.
  - jamiequint 11y ago
    The new Outlook app is actually surprisingly good. I think the Sunrise guys (sunrise.am) are running that team and it shows. I laughed the first 2 times friends recommended me the app, but I tried it and now also highly recommend it.
    - conception 11y ago
      For certain. I just gave it a try a couple of weeks ago and it's now my default client as a gmail user.
    - colinbartlett 11y ago
      I used Acompli and now I use Outlook. My favorite tiny detail is that I can tune the notifications to push only unread counts to the icon badge and only for the "focused" inbox. That means I can avoid constant push notices for email yet still be able to glance down when I want to and see if I have any unread emails that are actual human communications.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    Gmail on mobile does have a unified inbox: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-unified-inbox/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-un...
- erikb 11y ago
  Seriously how can you even like Outlook? Yes people need to use it, but want? Does anybody really know other mail programs and wants to use Outlook?
untog 11y ago
Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup. Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards. EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.
- bdotdub 11y ago
  > there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.
  - racl101 11y ago
    "I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client." Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook. And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do. Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
sethd 11y ago
Yeah, after Sparrow was killed off I switched to Airmail for OS X (currently using Airmail 2). It's not without flaws and I'm always keeping an eye on the options. On iOS I'm pretty happy with Microsoft Outlook (can't believe I just said that), I haven't found anything better yet. I do use multiple accounts extensively so that limits my choices to just those clients that support multiple accounts well (unified inbox, etc).
- grinich 11y ago
  If you're a desktop email aficionado, I'd love to hear your feedback on N1. It's kind of similar to Mailbox desktop, but works cross-platform and is open source. https://nylas.com/n1 https://nylas.com/n1 (Also feel free to write me directly. mg@nylas.com)
  - tdkl 11y ago
    Is the email stored on your servers ? Do we get contacts and calendars inside the app as well ? If yes, on which email providers/account types ? Why isn't this info on the website ? Thanks.
    - brazzledazzle 11y ago
      If you look on this page it talks about the mail being hosted on their servers: https://nylas.com/N1/faq https://nylas.com/N1/faq
  - zyxley 11y ago
    Does it have a "snooze email" feature, though? The page suggests it doesn't, and that's (IMO) the important part of Mailbox, not just the general interface of it.
    - z1mm32m4n 11y ago
      I asked this a while back when it came out, sounds like it doesn't. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154 Update: It looks like they have a public Trello board for voting on features. Go vote for snoozed emails! [2]: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap
cbhl 11y ago
Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't. Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.) When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses? That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
- schneidmaster 11y ago
  > And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to? I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I did expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way to make a decent kettle that lasts a lifetime, or a similarly decent fridge, or washing machine, or even a watch. Sadly, I was disappointed. If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening. [0] - or Moloch.
    - three14 11y ago
      There's a difference - software also has unplanned obsolescence. For instance, I've been working on a non-profit website that has a fair amount of QuickTime video from way back when that was a good choice. If you don't do something about it, it won't play anymore on modern browsers. It's hard to align the interests of software developers with the interests of customers using a one-time purchase, but with work that continues indefinitely. Appliances are different since I don't need their features to change long after the sale. In this case, if they can charge me more at the time of the sale for an appliance that lasts longer, we can align interests.
Spooky23 11y ago
Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.
- downtide 11y ago
  Like many things, clients could do with some usability enhancements. E.g. encrypted mail. Without which, I find it off-putting.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Encryption is really an identity problem. For intra-corporate mail, email works just great, because the identity problem is solved. Trusted communications between 3rd parties just isn't a natural mail use case.
    - coffee 11y ago
      > For intra-corporate mail, email works just great Not really. Hence the rise of intra-corporate chat software. People instead prefer to join focused, well defined groups to send and receive intra-corporate communication. Not bee CC'ed spammed all to h*ll about every little office detail that has zero impact on you and your job.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Email is plenty broken. Spam, for example.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Spam is pretty much addressed these days. You need to consider what is more valuable, the ability to universally send arbitrary content to arbitrary end points without intermediaries .... Or no spam, and perfect security. As I said, it's all about identity.
tedmiston 11y ago
Am I the only one still using Sparrow to this day? Sure the build is 2+ years old, but the usability is just incredible. I haven't found anything better on desktop since.
- CptMouse 11y ago
  Airmail is quite good, and AFAIK you can turn off some of its many features. http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/ (hint: You can use it for free if you use the beta version) I was a huge fan of Sparrow (like you, I used it long after the updates stopped), then Airmail and Mailbox, but now I simply use the Gmail web app. I follow the zero inbox method strictly, so I only need to read/archive/reply/search emails, and it does a decent job at it (except for search where it's best in class), while being simple and non-confusing.
- spike021 11y ago
  I was, but hadn't bought a license before the acquisition, so that part of things got a bit annoying. IIRC there are ads that take up a good amount of space.
robbyking 11y ago
> I still bounce around email clients every couple months Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.
vu0tran 11y ago
Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops. I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com http://www.slidemailapp.com I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome! Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425
- jonursenbach 11y ago
  What's your end goal with this? Surely it must be getting acquired by one of the big email providers.
  - limeyx 11y ago
    ...and then get shutdown?
  - timjahn 11y ago
    Exactly. By joining YC, the goal is automatically getting acquired. So the parent is solving the problem temporarily, until they become the problem.
  - alanh 11y ago
    Without joining the rush to judgement, allow me to say that I find this to be a legitimate inquiry, especially given the nature of your appeal in this thread. Care to respond?
  - vu0tran 11y ago
    Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course). I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question. There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer. For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier? So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero. So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dmbaggett 11y ago
I co-founded ITA Software and have been using some of the proceeds from the sale to Google to fund an email startup. (http://inky.com http://inky.com) The challenges outlined in this thread are all accurate. If you're thinking about putting effort (or money) behind an email startup, think again. I simply don't believe it's doable for a normal startup (i.e., one without a crazy rich guy plowing money into it until it's good enough). The VC-backed "winners" will all get aqui-hired, and then the acquirers will be unhappy because what they bought wasn't actually good enough for prime time. Here are just a handful of the reasons: - It is deceptively hard. Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc... The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP. And because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.) - The other entities you have to work with are a complete nightmare, and as the client app everything appears to be your fault. Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. just do whatever the hell they want, randomly, have broken servers they never fix, and place arbitrary problematic restrictions on clients: all limit clients to a small number of connections, and Apple won't let an email app run in the background, so you can't support "real" push notifications without keeping the user's credentials unencrypted in the cloud (which I refuse to do). Google, out of the blue, started banning clients that didn't use oAuth, sending users scary messages about unsafe software. oAuth is great, but just breaking everyone who doesn't support it yet is really, really nasty. - VCs absolutely hate the space. Email startups have been dogs forever, and every name-brand VC has been burned on a crappy email investment. - Consumers simply don't care about usability, privacy, or anything else enough to not use what comes with their phones. - Security-conscious people who might pay for something that's genuinely secure never believe anything is genuinely secure in practice unless it's open source... in which case there is no business model. - Existing mainstream clients are ironically sticky, because once users develop coping strategies to deal with the quirks of the client they're forced to use, they never want to invest the effort into learning the quirks of a new client. So why do I work on it? Because in my opinion it's a really important problem that affects billions of people -- and one that needs to be solved properly by folks who are doing it not just as a data harvesting operation, loss-leader to sell devices, or as a way to build a moat around a core offering (search).
hunvreus 11y ago
I'm genuinely curious as to what it is that Gmail (for example) doesn't provide yet that is so essential to dealing with emails. I gave a try to Mailbox but didn't see what the added value was, other than a couple UX gimmicks (some of which are now part of many email clients). Was there a killer feature that I missed?
- kalmi10 11y ago
  When Mailbox first came out, there was no Google Inbox, no snoozing, and the ios e-mail experience was lacking and sluggish in general. Mailbox fixed all that, and it was the first to properly do so that we trusted. We trusted it as it was by the well established Dropbox. But since Inbox came out, I have seen no reason to open Mailbox, and I would say that Mailbox actually inspired Inbox.
- darkr 11y ago
  Off the top of my head - offline support, PGP support, multi-account support, decent mail-list/threading support, separation of client from service provider.. I'm actually quite a fan of the gmail interface; it is one of the most usable webmail experiences in my opinion (I use google apps both at work and for personal use). For day-long usage, I'd rather stick with mutt/vim.
  - relaytheurgency 11y ago
    Folders. Didn't Gmail kill folders?
    - darkr 11y ago
      It has labels, of which you can apply one or more of to a message. When represented in IMAP, it appears as folders (though you get duplicate mail objects for every additional folder that a mail is tagged with). If you only apply only one label to a mail at a given time, it works as a folder would do just fine.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  Multiple accounts. I have multiple work accounts (several companies) and a personal one. Having each open in tabs/window would be too much. I use Apple's mail apps on Mac and iOS, with a single unified inbox.
codemac 11y ago
Proprietary tools just aren't worth the turnover for me. It's untenable to depend on developer tools that a company owns. I love free software, but in all honesty the reason I incorporate it is more selfish. My workstation is exclusively free software so I don't have to be abreast of business news to get my job done. I've basically settled on my emacs + notmuch + offlineimap solution not because I think it's better than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years. For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!
- darkr 11y ago
  I moved from offlineimap to mbsync (part of the iSync project) a few years ago and it has fixed most of the issues I had with offlineimap (mainly high resource usage).
  - codemac 11y ago
    Several people have suggested similar. I should do it, but the nice part of OSS: I can do it whenever it bothers me enough :) Do you have a config posted anywhere? I'd love to see exactly how hard it would be to switch.
    - darkr 11y ago
      It's pretty straightforward to configure - Arch have a decent guide on their wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync Edit: Arch seems to suggest running mbsync under a global systemd unit - user units are more appropriate for this task - my units can be found here: https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units
- gcr 11y ago
  How do you send email with your pipeline? msmtp?
rsp1984 11y ago
That is, a $100m acqui-"hire". And the problem is, probably even Dropbox thinks that way. Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit bonkers?
grrowl 11y ago
FFS, just hand the product over to the community. Or have someone manage the project (security/features/quality) and accept patches from the community. Or use ANY of the revenue to hire someone outside the aqui-hire part-time to work on it. It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date. "—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.
on_and_off 11y ago
FWIIW, Inbox has been created by the Sparrow team (among other googlers oc), so at least it is not a case where an acquihire ends with the people working on completely unrelated things.

cm2012 11y ago

What do you not like about Outlook or Gmail (I think the market leaders)?

zyxley 11y ago
The "delay for later" feature is tremendously useful compared to traditional inbox handling. Of course, to trust that feature, it also has to be tremendously reliable, and that's the biggest thing that Mailbox got right in the first place. That's also why it very handily beat out Mail Pilot, which had the same idea and got started earlier but to this day is still filled with terrible bugs.
zimpenfish 11y ago
They don't work with other people's IMAP/POP3 servers? (Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)
- msh 11y ago
  Gmail for Android supports third party pop\imap servers quite well.
- cbhl 11y ago
  The GMail Android app does work with other people's IMAP and POP3 servers, for what it's worth. But then you have to use Android. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en
- cwyers 11y ago
  Outlook supports IMAP, not POP3. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-email-on-iPhone-iPad-or-iPod-Touch-b2de2161-cc1d-49ef-9ef9-81acd1c8e234#BKMK_IMAPorPOP https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-email-on-iPh...
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    Ah, good to know, thanks.
jarin 11y ago
It's such a pain to process hundreds of emails in Outlook, and there's no snoozing like there is with Mailbox or Inbox.
- mdeeks 11y ago
  Outlook does have snooze/scheduling. Just curious, how is processing hundreds of emails in Mailbox or Inbox better than Outlook? Seems like trying to do that on a mobile device would be hard no matter what app.
ketralnis 11y ago
I'm not the parent but Outlook's IMAP support is quirky at best and I very strongly prefer native applications to web applications. I also host my own email which marks gmail right out. Email should be simple but there has been essentially no lasting innovation in email clients in a very long time unless you really want Google to host it for you
xxpor 11y ago
Outlook (I assume you're referring to the mobile app, not the desktop client) puts all of your emails on MS's servers, so that's a no go for lots of people. Last I checked, the gmail app only worked with gmail accounts.
- threatofrain 11y ago
  The Gmail app actually allows 3rd-party IMAP connections.
  - gcr 11y ago
    Do you mean gmail's web interface? That works by downloading your emails from your 3rd-party IMAP connections into Gmail's server.
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      No, he means the 'Gmail' app (on Android phones at least, not sure about iPhones) allows third part servers. They rolled the Mail client into it.
schneidmaster 11y ago
Gmail on mobile still doesn't have a unified inbox, and it also doesn't have features I've come to depend on such as snoozing messages. I usually use Inbox by Gmail on mobile, which also lacks a unified inbox and (bizarrely enough) support for HTML signatures but does have pretty good message snoozing, and I like how it handles bundling. Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.
- jamiequint 11y ago
  The new Outlook app is actually surprisingly good. I think the Sunrise guys (sunrise.am) are running that team and it shows. I laughed the first 2 times friends recommended me the app, but I tried it and now also highly recommend it.
  - conception 11y ago
    For certain. I just gave it a try a couple of weeks ago and it's now my default client as a gmail user.
  - colinbartlett 11y ago
    I used Acompli and now I use Outlook. My favorite tiny detail is that I can tune the notifications to push only unread counts to the icon badge and only for the "focused" inbox. That means I can avoid constant push notices for email yet still be able to glance down when I want to and see if I have any unread emails that are actual human communications.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Gmail on mobile does have a unified inbox: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-unified-inbox/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-un...
erikb 11y ago
Seriously how can you even like Outlook? Yes people need to use it, but want? Does anybody really know other mail programs and wants to use Outlook?

untog 11y ago

Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup. Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards. EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.

minimaxir 11y ago
I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.
bdotdub 11y ago
> there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.
- racl101 11y ago
  "I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client." Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook. And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do. Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.

sethd 11y ago

Yeah, after Sparrow was killed off I switched to Airmail for OS X (currently using Airmail 2). It's not without flaws and I'm always keeping an eye on the options. On iOS I'm pretty happy with Microsoft Outlook (can't believe I just said that), I haven't found anything better yet. I do use multiple accounts extensively so that limits my choices to just those clients that support multiple accounts well (unified inbox, etc).

grinich 11y ago
If you're a desktop email aficionado, I'd love to hear your feedback on N1. It's kind of similar to Mailbox desktop, but works cross-platform and is open source. https://nylas.com/n1 https://nylas.com/n1 (Also feel free to write me directly. mg@nylas.com)
- tdkl 11y ago
  Is the email stored on your servers ? Do we get contacts and calendars inside the app as well ? If yes, on which email providers/account types ? Why isn't this info on the website ? Thanks.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    If you look on this page it talks about the mail being hosted on their servers: https://nylas.com/N1/faq https://nylas.com/N1/faq
- zyxley 11y ago
  Does it have a "snooze email" feature, though? The page suggests it doesn't, and that's (IMO) the important part of Mailbox, not just the general interface of it.
  - z1mm32m4n 11y ago
    I asked this a while back when it came out, sounds like it doesn't. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154 Update: It looks like they have a public Trello board for voting on features. Go vote for snoozed emails! [2]: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap

cbhl 11y ago

Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't. Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.) When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses? That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?

schneidmaster 11y ago
> And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to? I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I did expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way to make a decent kettle that lasts a lifetime, or a similarly decent fridge, or washing machine, or even a watch. Sadly, I was disappointed. If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening. [0] - or Moloch.
  - three14 11y ago
    There's a difference - software also has unplanned obsolescence. For instance, I've been working on a non-profit website that has a fair amount of QuickTime video from way back when that was a good choice. If you don't do something about it, it won't play anymore on modern browsers. It's hard to align the interests of software developers with the interests of customers using a one-time purchase, but with work that continues indefinitely. Appliances are different since I don't need their features to change long after the sale. In this case, if they can charge me more at the time of the sale for an appliance that lasts longer, we can align interests.

Spooky23 11y ago

Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.

downtide 11y ago
Like many things, clients could do with some usability enhancements. E.g. encrypted mail. Without which, I find it off-putting.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Encryption is really an identity problem. For intra-corporate mail, email works just great, because the identity problem is solved. Trusted communications between 3rd parties just isn't a natural mail use case.
  - coffee 11y ago
    > For intra-corporate mail, email works just great Not really. Hence the rise of intra-corporate chat software. People instead prefer to join focused, well defined groups to send and receive intra-corporate communication. Not bee CC'ed spammed all to h*ll about every little office detail that has zero impact on you and your job.
s73v3r 11y ago
Email is plenty broken. Spam, for example.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Spam is pretty much addressed these days. You need to consider what is more valuable, the ability to universally send arbitrary content to arbitrary end points without intermediaries .... Or no spam, and perfect security. As I said, it's all about identity.

tedmiston 11y ago

Am I the only one still using Sparrow to this day? Sure the build is 2+ years old, but the usability is just incredible. I haven't found anything better on desktop since.

CptMouse 11y ago
Airmail is quite good, and AFAIK you can turn off some of its many features. http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/ (hint: You can use it for free if you use the beta version) I was a huge fan of Sparrow (like you, I used it long after the updates stopped), then Airmail and Mailbox, but now I simply use the Gmail web app. I follow the zero inbox method strictly, so I only need to read/archive/reply/search emails, and it does a decent job at it (except for search where it's best in class), while being simple and non-confusing.
spike021 11y ago
I was, but hadn't bought a license before the acquisition, so that part of things got a bit annoying. IIRC there are ads that take up a good amount of space.

robbyking 11y ago

> I still bounce around email clients every couple months Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.

vu0tran 11y ago

Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops. I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com http://www.slidemailapp.com I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome! Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425

jonursenbach 11y ago
What's your end goal with this? Surely it must be getting acquired by one of the big email providers.
- limeyx 11y ago
  ...and then get shutdown?
- timjahn 11y ago
  Exactly. By joining YC, the goal is automatically getting acquired. So the parent is solving the problem temporarily, until they become the problem.
- alanh 11y ago
  Without joining the rush to judgement, allow me to say that I find this to be a legitimate inquiry, especially given the nature of your appeal in this thread. Care to respond?
- vu0tran 11y ago
  Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course). I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question. There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer. For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier? So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero. So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dmbaggett 11y ago

I co-founded ITA Software and have been using some of the proceeds from the sale to Google to fund an email startup. (http://inky.com http://inky.com) The challenges outlined in this thread are all accurate. If you're thinking about putting effort (or money) behind an email startup, think again. I simply don't believe it's doable for a normal startup (i.e., one without a crazy rich guy plowing money into it until it's good enough). The VC-backed "winners" will all get aqui-hired, and then the acquirers will be unhappy because what they bought wasn't actually good enough for prime time. Here are just a handful of the reasons: - It is deceptively hard. Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc... The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP. And because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.) - The other entities you have to work with are a complete nightmare, and as the client app everything appears to be your fault. Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. just do whatever the hell they want, randomly, have broken servers they never fix, and place arbitrary problematic restrictions on clients: all limit clients to a small number of connections, and Apple won't let an email app run in the background, so you can't support "real" push notifications without keeping the user's credentials unencrypted in the cloud (which I refuse to do). Google, out of the blue, started banning clients that didn't use oAuth, sending users scary messages about unsafe software. oAuth is great, but just breaking everyone who doesn't support it yet is really, really nasty. - VCs absolutely hate the space. Email startups have been dogs forever, and every name-brand VC has been burned on a crappy email investment. - Consumers simply don't care about usability, privacy, or anything else enough to not use what comes with their phones. - Security-conscious people who might pay for something that's genuinely secure never believe anything is genuinely secure in practice unless it's open source... in which case there is no business model. - Existing mainstream clients are ironically sticky, because once users develop coping strategies to deal with the quirks of the client they're forced to use, they never want to invest the effort into learning the quirks of a new client. So why do I work on it? Because in my opinion it's a really important problem that affects billions of people -- and one that needs to be solved properly by folks who are doing it not just as a data harvesting operation, loss-leader to sell devices, or as a way to build a moat around a core offering (search).

hunvreus 11y ago

I'm genuinely curious as to what it is that Gmail (for example) doesn't provide yet that is so essential to dealing with emails. I gave a try to Mailbox but didn't see what the added value was, other than a couple UX gimmicks (some of which are now part of many email clients). Was there a killer feature that I missed?

kalmi10 11y ago
When Mailbox first came out, there was no Google Inbox, no snoozing, and the ios e-mail experience was lacking and sluggish in general. Mailbox fixed all that, and it was the first to properly do so that we trusted. We trusted it as it was by the well established Dropbox. But since Inbox came out, I have seen no reason to open Mailbox, and I would say that Mailbox actually inspired Inbox.
darkr 11y ago
Off the top of my head - offline support, PGP support, multi-account support, decent mail-list/threading support, separation of client from service provider.. I'm actually quite a fan of the gmail interface; it is one of the most usable webmail experiences in my opinion (I use google apps both at work and for personal use). For day-long usage, I'd rather stick with mutt/vim.
- relaytheurgency 11y ago
  Folders. Didn't Gmail kill folders?
  - darkr 11y ago
    It has labels, of which you can apply one or more of to a message. When represented in IMAP, it appears as folders (though you get duplicate mail objects for every additional folder that a mail is tagged with). If you only apply only one label to a mail at a given time, it works as a folder would do just fine.
lobster_johnson 11y ago
Multiple accounts. I have multiple work accounts (several companies) and a personal one. Having each open in tabs/window would be too much. I use Apple's mail apps on Mac and iOS, with a single unified inbox.

codemac 11y ago

Proprietary tools just aren't worth the turnover for me. It's untenable to depend on developer tools that a company owns. I love free software, but in all honesty the reason I incorporate it is more selfish. My workstation is exclusively free software so I don't have to be abreast of business news to get my job done. I've basically settled on my emacs + notmuch + offlineimap solution not because I think it's better than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years. For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!

darkr 11y ago
I moved from offlineimap to mbsync (part of the iSync project) a few years ago and it has fixed most of the issues I had with offlineimap (mainly high resource usage).
- codemac 11y ago
  Several people have suggested similar. I should do it, but the nice part of OSS: I can do it whenever it bothers me enough :) Do you have a config posted anywhere? I'd love to see exactly how hard it would be to switch.
  - darkr 11y ago
    It's pretty straightforward to configure - Arch have a decent guide on their wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync Edit: Arch seems to suggest running mbsync under a global systemd unit - user units are more appropriate for this task - my units can be found here: https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units
gcr 11y ago
How do you send email with your pipeline? msmtp?

rsp1984 11y ago

That is, a $100m acqui-"hire". And the problem is, probably even Dropbox thinks that way. Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit bonkers?

grrowl 11y ago

FFS, just hand the product over to the community. Or have someone manage the project (security/features/quality) and accept patches from the community. Or use ANY of the revenue to hire someone outside the aqui-hire part-time to work on it. It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date. "—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.

on_and_off 11y ago

FWIIW, Inbox has been created by the Sparrow team (among other googlers oc), so at least it is not a case where an acquihire ends with the people working on completely unrelated things.