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MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

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Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#71

Post by cracell »

gwillen wrote: post #24

Your claim that your product will not be discontinued is worthless. If you're so sure of that, put your money where your mouth is, and offer an SLA with a contractual minimum duration you promise to keep the service up, and significant monetary penalties if you fail to meet it. Doesn't sound like a good idea? Then shut up.

I'd love to see companies whose charters legally make them impossible to acquire. No idea how this would work in practice or if you could actually make it enforceable under US law.

But I'm so sick of startups just being R&D for corporations and screwing over their userbase once they get acquired. Or even worse is companies that only get off of the ground because of user support via kickstarter or similar fund raising platforms and then get acquired.

Of course it would be much harder for those companies to raise funds but there's always bootstrapping. It'd be a big win for the consumers of the product and if marketed correctly (something like "Non-Acquirable LLC"), it could become a good way for a startup to show that they put their users first.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#72

Post by MichaelApproved »

Artemis2 wrote: post #61
ProAm wrote: post #43

Im a bit amazing that the name "Inbox" was available for a product involving email.

Names are always available when you have some money to invest in buying rights and domains.

The name is Inbox App, not Inbox. Nothing special there.

I'm willing to bet that they'll have significant problems with the name if they try to call it just "Inbox". First, they didn't even get the inbox.com domain, theirs is inboxapp.com. Second, they don't seem to have a trademark on the product name as "Inbox" and I doubt that they'd get one. Third, their company name is Inbox App, Inc., so it doesn't seem like they did anything special in terms of buying rights or domains.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#73

Post by spang »

alooPotato wrote: post #2

This is great. We've used ContextIO in the past (they've been great) so good to see more ways to access user email data. Any comparisons vs. contextIO? Do you index all the data yourselves, or proxy requests to the actual mail provider?

Hi there, Christine from Inbox here.

Inbox is pretty much a superset of ContextIO. (You can also use it to send mails, and "entire mail clients" is a supported use case.)

Unlike ContextIO, we don't proxy requests directly to the backend mail store---we run a mail sync engine and query that instead. Lots faster and gives us a lot more room to make future improvements. Data just has to make it into the datastore in the right format and then it's accessible to query via the API. :)

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#74

Post by andrewfong »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #66
gwillen wrote: post #24

Your claim that your product will not be discontinued is worthless. If you're so sure of that, put your money where your mouth is, and offer an SLA with a contractual minimum duration you promise to keep the service up, and significant monetary penalties if you fail to meet it. Doesn't sound like a good idea? Then shut up.

> with a contractual minimum duration you promise to keep the service up, and significant monetary penalties if you fail to meet it. Take it down a few notches, you're solution will likely not work. This is the company's only product. If the product gets discontinued, the company is likely broke. The "significant monetary penalties" is unenforceable because the company will not have any money to fulfill the SLA penal…

It's a good hedge against an acquisition though. Presumably you could structure the SLA such that any acquirer would be on the hook.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#75

Post by smacktoward »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #66
gwillen wrote: post #24

Your claim that your product will not be discontinued is worthless. If you're so sure of that, put your money where your mouth is, and offer an SLA with a contractual minimum duration you promise to keep the service up, and significant monetary penalties if you fail to meet it. Doesn't sound like a good idea? Then shut up.

> with a contractual minimum duration you promise to keep the service up, and significant monetary penalties if you fail to meet it. Take it down a few notches, you're solution will likely not work. This is the company's only product. If the product gets discontinued, the company is likely broke. The "significant monetary penalties" is unenforceable because the company will not have any money to fulfill the SLA penal…

>If the product gets discontinued, the company is likely broke

Or has just been acquired, which I think is more what the parent was getting at.

>The "significant monetary penalties" is unenforceable because the company will not have any money to fulfill the SLA penalty.

The acquirer would, though!

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#77

Post by exelius »

grinich wrote: post #21
Agathos wrote: post #10

“Inbox is an email company. Google is an advertising company. This product is our focus, and will not be ‘discontinued’ unexpectedly.” Burn! Very amusing. But for all we know they will be acqui-hired, maybe even by Google, and then shifted to a different project.

I said this in the other thread and I know it sounds cliché, but we're not planning to "go away" or get acquired or something. We've always positioned this company as a long-term play, and made that very clear when hiring, raising money, etc. It's just not possible to go after something big if you plan to "flip" the company quickly.

Yeah, but very few companies start with plans to be "flipped". The reality is that the failure rate of startups is very high, the exit options are few, and privacy policies generally aren't worth the digital bits they're stored on. While you may have the best of intentions (and I genuinely believe you do) it's still not enough to let me give you access to all of my e-mail. I already do this with Google; shifting my e-mail to a new service is not practical so I would simply have two companies with access to all my e-mail instead of one. I'm also suspicious what you get out of the deal: you know how it goes, if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product... At least with Google, I know and understand their intentions.

I wish you the best of luck, because this is a hard space to play in.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#78

Post by ammmir »

it's great to see friendlier APIs for working with email! is Inbox intended more for building email clients, compared to something like Switchboard (http://switchboard.spatch.co/) which is more for processing inbound email?

any plans for a WebSocket API? seems like it would be easier to receive pushed emails on an existing socket, than registering a webhook and then sending a push notification out-of-band to the client to fetch new emails.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#79

Post by grinich »

arasmussen wrote: post #4

What I would really love for someone to fix is how slow email is. Why is it so much slower to send an email than an SMS or FB message with the same contents?

The short answer is that (1) email wasn't designed to be instantaneous, and (2) it uses a distributed protocol.

One of our goals is to make transit as fast as possible. But there's a limit to what Inbox can do right now since it works on top of existing providers, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.

Re: MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform

#80

Post by nawitus »

grinich wrote: post #21
Agathos wrote: post #10

“Inbox is an email company. Google is an advertising company. This product is our focus, and will not be ‘discontinued’ unexpectedly.” Burn! Very amusing. But for all we know they will be acqui-hired, maybe even by Google, and then shifted to a different project.

I said this in the other thread and I know it sounds cliché, but we're not planning to "go away" or get acquired or something. We've always positioned this company as a long-term play, and made that very clear when hiring, raising money, etc. It's just not possible to go after something big if you plan to "flip" the company quickly.

I wonder if it's possible to make that promise a legally binding contract. Of course all startups say that they won't "go away", but most of them will even if they say they won't.
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