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Mailpile: Let’s take email back

mailpile.is

211–220 of 241 posts

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#211
post #66

I'm in the crowdfunding business, so I feel strange saying this, but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated,' especially when asking for a sum as large as is $100,000. What happened to building something and selling it? According to the campaign page, the need is so great because: "We're asking for a lot of money, so of course you…

What a bizarre and nihilistic reaction. People will look at the app for themselves, decide whether it's a good value proposition for them or not. Nobody needs your bitching and moaning; if you don't like it, don't pay anything. You're just demoralizing people for the sake of it. I'm disgusted that yours is the top ranked comment.

On one hand I agree with you, but playing devil's advocate - isn't this a discussion board, precisely the place where people would pay attention to such things? Applying your same logic, one could say "He's just expressing his opinion. If you don't like his comment, don't pay attention to it"

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, why? You're just discouraging people from contributing by forcing them to accept that their code might be used in a matter they don't approve of in the future.

Because it prevents a choice of more liberal licensing later. Ogre3D was able to successfully transition from LGPL to MID/BSD because of contributor agreements. The Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and others all require contributor agreements for very good reasons. If your projects starts out with very liberal licensing, it's not necessary strictly speaking (unless you're concerned about patents…

It might also discourage contributors who don't want a transition to a different license. After all, contributor agreements also give the power to go closed source later on.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, in the Bay Area $4166 is almost exactly what an exempt employee making $100K actually takes home every month.

No, if they were making $100K, then taxes and witholding, etc. will leave them with roughly 65% of their gross. So they'd actually be taking home closer to $5416 per month. Still "sad" (given that average rental rate on a two-bedroom apartments is $2K+ per month in the general bay area), but not quite as much.

We will be doing this legally, which means paying ourselves salaries and paying taxes etc. etc.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any plans for a solr support? there's a lot of knowledge out there on how to scale solr for large webmail deployments like i.e. inside a large company or for forensic mail analysis.

Solr is written in Java. How is that compatible with something that's hassle-free for end users?

Is Java really that much more effort to set up than Python? Solr's problem isn't Java, it's the bloaty mess of XML configuration files it insists on having - something like elasticsearch pretty much Just Works.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#219
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated' Isn't that the whole premise behind a huge chunk of the projects on indiegogo and Kickstarter? "I want to make a cool thing, but I can't afford to quit my day job; please pay me up front"? I mean, I'm truly concerned about online privacy, but there are several barriers standing between me…

Except with VC, the money is given with the expectation of an occasional huge return. With a crowd-funded open source project, one there is no possibility of getting anything more than a program you could get for free if others funded its development. This is clearly a very different situation.

But as a crowdfunder, I know that going in. Donation levels are clearly marked with what returns, if any, I can expect if the project is successful. "Worthwhile" to a VC means "big financial returns"; "worthwhile" to a crowdfunder means "this cool thing gets made". It's exactly the same concept; how it works out in practice is just mechanics.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#220

Should they succeed, let us hope that the mobile version of the webmail client will function better than the mobile version of your static site. Pretty unusable in MobileSafari.

Hey topherwhite I'm the UI/UX designer of Mailpile- totally aware of the poor rendering on mobile at present. Working on fixing that- was swamped with other aspects of the campaign launch. Thanks for your feedback :)
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