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The #1 difficulty with email startups is that they have to invent a market that doesn't exist and doesn't want to exist. Few people even know that they can acc
by kijin 13y ago
The #1 difficulty with email startups is that they have to invent a market that doesn't exist and doesn't want to exist.
Few people even know that they can access Gmail anywhere other than at mail.google.com or via the Gmail app. Ditto for hotmail/outlook.com and pretty much every other freemail service out there. And of course ad-supported freemail providers have no incentive to let their users access email with a third-party app.
The distinction between an email service and an email app is so murky in the minds of most people, that Mozilla added a dialog box to Thunderbird where they offer to create a new email account for the user. Seriously, a lot of people were wondering why Thunderbird didn't come with its own email address! Instead of trying to dispel this myth, Mozilla just let people keep believing it.
- mattmanser 13y agoYou're ignoring enterprise, there is a huge industry around business email hosting which more often than not uses an email client (and more often than not that client is outlook or the iphone mail app). Google Apps was certainly taking a huge chunk out of enterprise, but I don't know if that's still happening now that you have to pay for it from employee #1. Outlook usage is so embedded and big enough that Google built a sync app, but moderately funnily, the 'how to integrate google apps with Outlook' video on this page is missing, not sure if that's a reflection of how few people use it? https://support.google.com/a/answer/33322?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/33322?hl=en