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The fundamental problem with virtually all attempts to innovate in the email/messaging space is that the bar for an MVP is incredibly high. So you either have t
by dmbaggett 14y ago
The fundamental problem with virtually all attempts to innovate in the email/messaging space is that the bar for an MVP is incredibly high. So you either have to layer on somebody else's work (GMail, Outlook) and end up strategically hampered and at best aqui-hired, or you have to slog through years of work getting your own stack to MVP level. Mail/messaging is fractal in nature: the closer you look, the more detail there is.
And we've learned over the years working on Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com) that users simply, positively, absolutely will not accept a mail client that's not MVP in all the expected areas. If people can't use your mail client as their primary mail client, they're not going to use it at all. This makes delivering incremental improvements like turning the inbox into a task list very difficult -- impossible, in my view, which is why we've created our own complete client stack.
- skywalk 14y agoLike the UI of your product alot - I take it there isn't a way to get the frontend without hooking up to your backend (e.g. simple IMAP setup?) What is your business model for it? Since it's free, are you parsing all the mail and providing data services to interested companies looking to mine information?
- dmbaggett 14y agoThanks! I'm not sure what you mean about using the front-end without the back-end, but Inky's an IMAP/POP client like any other; it just stores your settings in the cloud. (If you mean "can I use it without storing my settings in the cloud", the answer is currently no... at least, not yet.) We are not parsing the mail and mining data from it, nor do we plan to. We're looking at various non-privacy-invading ways to make money but we need more real-world data to see what makes the most sense.
- skywalk 14y agoYep that's what I was getting at - still not comfortable relying on an external service for email.
- dmbaggett 14y agoWell, you can point Inky at your own mail servers; your mail never enters our network.
- e1ven 14y agoI don't mean to speak for the OP, but I'm not particularly comfortable with that idea. I don't necessarily know how well you are protecting them, or if your admins are able to copy my password. Even if you encrypt it, who's to say how well? What if you DB leaks, and my credentials are in the hands of the "bad guys". It's not fundamentally terrible, but it increases the attack vector..
- dmbaggett 14y agoActually, you do know -- but only if you read my posts and related discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971002 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971002 We're going to add this as a FAQ on the site with the next rev.
- songgao 14y agoLooks neat. I just download it. Is there any reason it's a .pkg instead of a .App that can be dragged into Application folder?
- dmbaggett 14y agoYes, the .pkg installer allows us to automatically kill a running Inky process, which would otherwise prevent installation from succeeding.
- songgao 14y agoThat permission is a lot. Some people may not be comfortable with this. I know some guy living in China who refuses to install anything on Mac that requires entering the password.
- dmbaggett 14y ago.pkg installers don't have to ask for the password; ours does, but we're working on changing that.
- alooPotato 14y agoI would tend to disagree that building upon another platform like Gmail is "strategically hampered". We (streak.com) think its the only way to get users to switch to your email service - build it on top of their existing email client (gmail) and slowly start replacing pieces of the Gmail stack until they are exclusively using you. Thats been our not-so-secret strategy from the beginning. It allows the user to slowly onboard to your product instead of making a one time "do I want to switch over my email?" type of decision which is obviously much harder.
- dmbaggett 14y agoThe problem is that if you create real value, Google will simply clone what you've done. Because, by definition, they have the vast majority of the code required to do it already.