With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

i'd like a premium email service where i pay for it. these days, i like spending money for products. i'd have paid for fluent.io.

I was not aware of Fluent but it looks fairly similar to about 100 or so other email sites, with a full list here http://blog.bartjellema.com/2012/02/22/email-startups/

Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to extend things that way?

This request happens for every startup that closes. I don't think it's realistic most of the time, because projects like this are heavily tied to specific infrastructure and the optimum level of technical debt for a startup is much higher than the optimum level for an open source project whose survivorship depends on the community picking it up and taking it over (because it's unlikely the founders will spend much time working with it). Furthermore, the team would need to devote time to auditing the security aspects (e.g. looking for sensitive data that might have been in the code base, by accident at best, sheer ignorance at worst) before releasing it, which takes further time.

So I think it's more important to ask for user data to be handed over cleanly and securely, and for certain data to be made public if it's of general interest (though again, that requires diligent security auditing).

Anyway, it would be good to have some evidence that this common call for open source has actually paid off in the past. Closest I can think of is Firefox, but the circumstances were very unique - for one thing, it rose from the ashes of a project had at one point been wildly successful.

Ever tried sending an attachment to someone over 4-5mb? One of the most broken aspects of email right there and something that won't be changing any time soon. Sure you can use a service like Mediafire or Rapidshare, but it's just another step that shouldn't exist in this day and age.

I feel that email needs fixing. I will explain my opinion by walking through my history with email, chronologically:

1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything modern.

1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo. Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell username, and the system sends email with one return email address when the message is original with me, but when I'm replying to an email sent by someone else, the return email address is different. Both email addresses go to my account, but my friends have often been confused about which my "real" email account is. And so have I. All the same, to this day, I still use this account in emergencies, when other email technologies have failed me. I hate, hate, hate the fact that so much of my "Sent" history is locked inside of this system.

1998 - an intense period of experimentation during which I tried 8 different email clients, many from very small 3rd parties, some of which only had a single developer, but some of which were famous among that crowd of tech elite who had been on the internet since the 1980s. All of these clients were later abandoned by their developers, or the company that owned the software went backrupt. There was one exception: Outlook Express.

1997-2000 - used Outlook Express. Downside was simply that it ran on Windows, and I was never happy being on Windows. Also, when I was ready to move to something else, I could not find any easy way to mass export my email, nor save it in some format other than eml.

2001-2007 the year before I had started renting my own server and keeping my email on my own server. In 2001 I switched to Linux as my main computer. After some experimentation, I settled down to using Thunderbird. My problem was that this client was incredibly buggy. At least on my Red Hat machine, and later on my Ubuntu machine, Thunderbird had many, many bugs and would often crash, causing me to lose a lot of work. Frustrated with Thunderbird, I would sometimes switch back to using my Geocities account, which I sort of hated, but which was more reliable.

2007-2009 - used Gmail, but hated having to rely on a 3rd party, and have also had privacy concerns with Google. Since 2000 I have preferred to rent my own server and keep my email on my own machine.

2010-2011 - used Pine. Also experimented with using Emacs as my main email client. I love Emacs, but decided I did not like it for email.

2011 - by 2010 I had sort of given up on Linux and switched to using a Mac as my main machine. Sometimes use the Mail.app for particular purposes, such as subscribing to various newsgroups. In general afraid of vendor lock-in and would prefer an open source solution. Mostly used Thunderbird. It is much less buggy than what I had to deal with years earlier on Linux. But still, it is somewhat buggy (sometimes search will stall, sometimes windows become non-responsive, and HTML quoting does not work well, which drives me crazy). It lacks some features that clients in the late 90s had, with the one big exception that it supports HTML email. However, I prefer to use plain text email, so that feature means nothing to me. When I try to use the HTML email, I run into numerous flaws that strike me as bugs: invisible barriers that will sometimes not allow the cursor to move up or down, when I'm using the arrow keys, or sections that won't allow themselves to be selected, or sections that can only be selected as a block. Drives me crazy.

It is 2012. I am unhappy with my email client. I would like something better, preferably open source.