Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
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Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#2I'm trying to build an email platform too, yes it's hard. But I thought it was only because I'm a beginner and 1 man team.
Some of the reasons why I think it's hard:
* I don't think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation on this and it felt like I was venturing into territory never before seen.
* Parsing emails to be display correctly seems impossible. Sometimes emails have "
" in them and sometimes they have "\n". But what if the "\n" doesn't mean newline but it's just what someone wrote in the email? They come in a variety of mime types and formats. It sometimes seems impossible to do this.
* Not everyone uses the RFC standards! I thought the RFC said that a subject can only be 78 chars long. Yet I get emails all day long that go way beyond this which cause major problems in my code. AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE THAT CARES ABOUT RFCS?
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#3Nice article. But I think there are a few other things they missed out that make building an email client so difficult:
1. Consistency. Okay, this is always going to be a problem, since rendering anything more than plain text in emails is a minefield that makes the bad old days of Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator look like a utopia. But people still expect their Amazon/eBay/Google/whatever account/confirmation emails to look decent, so you have to figure out a basic HTML parser as well. And then try and make it somewhat work with people who are designing their messages with stuff like Outlook's Microsoft Word engine in mind.
2. Spam. I'm surprised this wasn't really mentioned in the article, but it's arguably the biggest issue any email provider, client developer or email server software maker has to deal with. You have to make sure your software can figure out what messages are unwanted, then either send them to the spam folder or delete them. Most startups don't have to figure that out, since their systems are closed and spam prevention can be done on sign up. Not so much if you're building an email client where any Tom, Dick or Harry can send messages to anyone with no real way to verify if they're human or not.
So yeah, few other issues.
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#4Nice article. But I think there are a few other things they missed out that make building an email client so difficult: 1. Consistency. Okay, this is always going to be a problem, since rendering anything more than plain text in emails is a minefield that makes the bad old days of Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator look like a utopia. But people still expect their Amazon/eBay/Google/whatever account/confirmation…
Unless you're building an MTA from scratch, I feel like the spam problem is solved by addons the MTA has, like SpamAssassin for Postfix.
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#5Nice article. But I think there are a few other things they missed out that make building an email client so difficult: 1. Consistency. Okay, this is always going to be a problem, since rendering anything more than plain text in emails is a minefield that makes the bad old days of Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator look like a utopia. But people still expect their Amazon/eBay/Google/whatever account/confirmation…
Unless you're building an MTA from scratch, I feel like the spam problem is solved by addons the MTA has, like SpamAssassin for Postfix.
If I ever get a chance to revamp an email system I will probably use rspamd instead. Those "add-ons" are painful.
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#6I'm trying to build an email platform too, yes it's hard. But I thought it was only because I'm a beginner and 1 man team. Some of the reasons why I think it's hard: * I don't think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation…
Look at http://archiveopteryx.org/badmail/ for your storage backend.
Strict RFC implementation, email normalization. Bad emails won't kill your email client 30 years from now.
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#7I'm trying to build an email platform too, yes it's hard. But I thought it was only because I'm a beginner and 1 man team. Some of the reasons why I think it's hard: * I don't think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation…
On your last point, email subjects are created by end users. I don't think I've ever had a mail client complain that my subject was too long and refer me to the RFC. Pretty much every application developer will prefer complying with their users' preferences rather than specs.
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#8There are tons of reasons why this is so hard. Leaving aside all of those there are 2 that I see as the biggest:
* A 100x improvement over current email is needed for a switch.
* It has to be 100x cheaper than the current product.
While you can't multiply by 0 and I meant that facetiously, users won't pay for the software or only niche consumers. Which is why email providers that get paid focus on things like security, collaboration and and backup. These products are essentially 90% other things and 10% email. examples:
* dropbox * slack * telegram * silent circle * sms
obviously I am not going to name everything in the space. I can't think of a company that has email at it's core. maybe 'hushmail' or some small encrypted mail providers but what profitable business is at it's core an email provider
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#9Why do people blog about what their company is building without so much as mentioning the name of their company or product or even a hyperlink?
In the author profile at the very bottom of the page, in small letters, there is a URL (but not a link) to
and the email client the author works on is apparently called Front. But why should her readers ever care about that?
Re: Why it’s so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014)
#10It will be easier to build a new email spec that's more feasible/modern with security built in mind than it is to build a sustainable email client that tries to comply with various email services (GMail is the worst offender for not being consistent with IMAP spec).
Mailmate is my fav OS X client that focues more on power user features but it has a boring classic interface which doesn't bother me at all. Despite having integration support with SMIME/PGP, Markdown reply, powerful search features, and so on that makes me productive, the only thing I hear when I recommend this to other people is that its UI is ugly. :|