361–370 of 435 posts
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That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.
Would you mind explaining what does "a moat" mean in this context?
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.
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 ev…
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I'm sorry, I apologise in advance, but this irks me. "We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app" Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
That's a long running debate and for our purposes unimportant. It's still a prominent, maybe even the most prominent, item on my personal list of "reasons I shouldn't build an email app."
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The Gmail app actually allows 3rd-party IMAP connections.
Do you mean gmail's web interface? That works by downloading your emails from your 3rd-party IMAP connections into Gmail's server.
And now those people will hate Dropbox.
> The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people And now those people will hate Dropbox.
its a pretty good approximation that compared to dropbox /nobody/ uses those products.
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Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.
Email is plenty broken. Spam, for example.
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.
Can anyone explain to me, someone who's more than happy with GMail, what these apps offer that aren't being offered by Google/Microsoft? It seems like Mailbox had a loyal following but I guess my email use is just not sophisticated enough to understand.
It's related to a productivity strategy called "inbox zero" where you immediately deal with every email in your inbox when you check your mail. "Deal with" might be to delete it if it's junk, respond immediately if you can, or defer it to later. A lot of these clients are aimed at making this process as fast and efficient as possible. So taking actions on an email are often just a swipe, and there are facilities to d…
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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 ev…
You wouldn't expect Slack to be able to make so much off of messaging - there's got to be some way to be better enough to make money.
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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 t…
How do you send email with your pipeline? msmtp?
Notably, I use the smtpmail-multi package along with smtpmail in emacs to support sending from whatever address I put in the To: line[0]
[0]: https://github.com/codemac/config/blob/master/emacs.d/boot.o...