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Show HN: A personal Gmail

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Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#91

Post by jubari »

canttestthis wrote: post #89

How did you make the layout? Graphics design is my biggest weakness, all my webapps look like the design is made in Paint. And yours is so clean, the fonts are good, everything looks so professional.

Hey thanks.

I make extensive use of http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ (a godsend for hackers), though I use it more as a style-guide and rebuild most parts myself.

and for icons:

http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

The font is "Open Sans": http://www.google.com/webfonts

The ui/ux evolved in this app, which means I started with the bare minimum requirements (it looked bad. really bad) and continually improved the "look & feel" as needed. No photoshop involved.

It's still not finished, but it has come a long way :)

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#92

Post by bgnm2000 »

The UI looks good - but its not even remotely intuitive.

I had to read your entire post to figure out what the right side bar is. Its very difficult to just focus on the main content (which is what the user should actually care about). Also the title seems disjointed and un-connect from the email, I had difficult determining if they were related, or if the title was some other kind of reminder.

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#93

Post by jetti »

smiler wrote: post #63
jetti wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think in the corporate sector, it would be very hard to dislodge Outlook, which is a shame really." I'm not sure how hard it would be to take some Outlook Web Access share away if targeting smaller companies since the cost could be potentially lower and licensing agreements potentially much easier to understand.

Have you seen office365.com? $6 a month per user for cloud Exchange, web e-mail, full Outlook integration if you want, plus online storage, view and editing of Word, Excel & Powerpoint. It's a lot to compete with for $6 a month.

Oh wow, ya it is a lot for a little and it is only $2 per user more if you go over 25 users. I didn't realize that you could just get online only.

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#94

Post by jfaucett »

hyphyphyph wrote: post #11

Open source the app. There's a huge lacking in good web based open source mail clients. Fill it. Offer a pay-for premium hosted version. Have us pay for service, not software. If you released this, assuming it doesn't suck balls, I'd be running it immediately. I'm currently using Rackspace for my email hosting; check them out. They're good, good be better. ;)

completely agree. I think if you were to open source this and did it right you could get an enormous community behind it.

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#96

Post by HarpuaCom »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #9
maratd wrote: post #5

> Would you even consider using the app, in case I'd make a commercial product out of it? No. I use Google because of the stuff that happens in the background, that I never see. Their infrastructure, SPAM blocking, Android app, intrusion detection, seamless support for custom domains, filtering and search, etc. GMail looks like a simple app, but it's actually a herculean effort on behalf of Google, a multi-billion do…

You say that like Gmail is the market leader here, they're not. Most of the features you mentioned do exist in other services and other services do have features that Gmail doesn't. The OP can definitely make a business out of email, it is far from a solved problem.

Building email clients are big gnarly tasks...more on that in the am...

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#97

Post by sspiff »

jubari wrote: post #28
sspiff wrote: post #19

This looks really well done, but as a consumer I wouldn't trust a small-timer (no offense) with something as ubiquitous as my email. As a company looking to self-host, however, your product looks very appealing, but then your battling other players than just GMail. I think in the corporate sector, it would be very hard to dislodge Outlook, which is a shame really.

This is actually my biggest concern, so no offense taken: Despite Google's privacy policy and ad behaviour (yadda yadda), they ARE still a trustworthy company, regarding uptime , backups and everything technical. Though I remember them losing quite a few accounts about a year back. But still, your point is very valid. Why would anyone trust a small company (or even single hacker) to maintain your precious emails.

I think some of the things that could help are:

* A very straightforward exit strategy: make it easy for users to at least extract their mail from your service, if they host it on your servers, and want to have an offline backup.

* Offer an option to license for self-hosting: hosting their own email could take away their fear of uncontrollable downtime.

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#98

Post by maverik22 »

hnriot wrote: post #84
maverik22 wrote: post #79

A lot of people here seem to like gmail. Well gmail sucks. Its slow, buggy, now has a bad user interface and is generally not what it used to be. It was awesome when it was first released, but there is better now,much better. We now have outlook.com(the new hotmail) which is just awesome in every way. And we have fastmail which I don't use, but the new ui is really groundbreaking. I left gmail the day outlook was rel…

This reads like a bot trying to pass a Turing test? The grammatical structure is so robotic. Obviously also a total pile of stinking anecdotal nonsense. You switched to Outlook, well, good for you. Something tells you you wouldn't recognize a good from bad ui if it bit you on your SCSI cable.

Aww I must have touched a nerve, how cute.

Don't cry okay you can still continue to use your crappy gmail. No one cares

Re: Show HN: A personal Gmail

#100

Post by rileyt »

This interface looks really good, but as previously stated, there are a lot of behind the scenes features (security, spam filter and keyboard shortcuts) that keep me with gmail.
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