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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

#91

Post by GuiA »

grinich wrote: post #50
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.

(Michael from Inbox here.) Ouch. We're just a few hackers trying to fix broken developer tools. Any claim is just a claim, for sure. We know that it's a long road to earn trust of other developers. One of the (many) reasons we made the sync engine open source was so that developers could run it on their own metal without trusting us. Transparency is really important to us. This is just the beta announcement of our AP…

> Ouch. We're just a few hackers trying to fix broken developer tools.

And we (gwillen and anyone who agrees with his comment, myself included) are just a few hackers who are tired of having the rug pulled under their feet when $CORP inevitably comes with the big bucks and all claims made by the founders in the early days of the company mysteriously disappear from the homepage.

Talk is cheap.

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

#92

Post by pjc50 »

grinich wrote: post #25
microtonal wrote: post #12

I hope that there will be some standardisation in these efforts. First there was Fastmail's JMAP, then Google's announcement of extending GMail's APIs and now this. IMAP has a lot of shortcomings, but at least it is a standard. That said, Inbox' approach seems nice in that it wraps a new API around 'legacy' protocols as well.

Michael from Inbox here. I actually looked pretty closely at JMAP when it was announce. It's really just a JavaScript wrapper around IMAP conventions. Plus, there's no way to actually use it-- it's just a document spec. The thing people don't realize about IMAP being a "standard" is that there are tons of extensions, weird bugs, provider-specific edge-cases, no comprehensive tests, no reference implementation, etc. I…

This I strongly agree with: what we want now is a RESTful JSON API for email retrieval and querying. IMAP was hairy 20 years ago and is stuck with its design choices forever.

But I can't see such a thing taking off unless it's Free.

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

#93

Post by pfraze »

personZ wrote: post #18
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.

Indeed, the probability of this being discontinued, if it follows normal trends, is dramatically higher than pretty much any Google product, and worse the notion that the "product is their focus" is specious: getting investment cash or a buyout is their focus, as it is with virtually all startups. Moralizing or taking shots at competitors is a dangerous tactic when you live in a glass house.

FWIW, inboxapp is self-hosted and under AGPL, so it's forkable.

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

#94

Post by jfb »

chimeracoder wrote: post #11

> But the larger goal with Inbox is not just to offer a suite of developer tools, but to create a new email standard. That means, Grinich says, the company has to provide the fundamental infrastructure as an open source package. I really am at a loss to think of something that email as a standard (and SMTP as a protocol) is lacking that requires a replacement. There are a lot of things that I would like from an email…

I really am at a loss to think of something that email as a standard (and SMTP as a protocol) is lacking that requires a replacement.

Postage. Solve the spam problem with economics. Can't be done with SMTP.

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

#95

Post by pessimizer »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #68
wldcordeiro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in action. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Disagree. It's harsh to make a point that there is no evidence they're telling the truth, not to be edgy or get attention. It would be better without the 'shut up' but a bit of an 'angry' tone is fitting. Really, I'm more uncomfortable with a link to a webcomic joke as an argument point...

It's not even an argument point, but just being used as a way to call someone a name without owning it.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by grinich »

ammmir wrote: post #78

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 cl…

PubSub is definitely a promising model for future APIs. This is just the beta API release, and we wanted to get feedback on the delta sync protocol first.

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

#99

Post by pjc50 »

cracell wrote: post #71
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…

Mutuals.

I was involved in setting one up at university (http://www.srcf.ucam.org/) and it's still running long past the time I had anything to do with it. I believe it's a good model for "community" internet services, by definition run in the interests of the users.

It's not impossible for one to sell out, but it requires the members (customers) to vote for it. In the case of the UK building societies, by bribing them with the capital reserves that were turned out to be essential to keeping the mortgage system running.

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