221–230 of 280 posts
“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.
It's Sparrow all over again :[
Right, so now all of my email can go through some third party's systems. That's exactly what we need in a post-Snowden world.
If you use this service, and if you don't think your mails are winding up in plain text in an NSA datacenter somewhere, you're a damn fool.
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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.
> but we're not planning to "go away" or get acquired or something If you've taken VC money, haven't you already gave up that choice? Despite pretenses, the VCs are going to want: a) IPO or b) acquisition. Since you assert b) is not your plan, do you really think you can become a $100m/year company (IPO) by charging for something that Google/MS/everyone else provides for free? Perhaps I am too pessimistic (or realist…
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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.
In that case, you should probably make a big fancy statement to that effect. It would be popular, people are very concerned about the issue of services being acquired and binned these days, it's such an obvious pattern. If you are not legally/politically able to make such a statement, then these casual assurances are worthless, and ultimately misleading.
People need to chill. This looks like an awesome product and platform, and it doesn't seem like it will require any data lock in (you can always move your emails from place to place, and it looks like they won't necessarily even require you to store emails on their servers. Worst comes to worst, if they shut down, I imagine they would provide migration utilities.
These guys are clearly pretty smart. If someone is going to build this product, they seem like a good choice.
I guess I'm a little confused here. As far as I can tell this isn't an email platform; it's a service that wraps IMAP and POP and exposes RESTful services. The grand claims in the text makes me think they're going to provide something that replaces email addresses and provides a better protocol than IMAP but that's not what's going on as far as I can tell. Am I missing anything? I'm not trying to be an ass and IMAP a…
I imagine the play here is to 1) build the API, 2) build a pluggable skeleton of a frontend, 3) chase the enterprise for huge swaths of customers with unique email needs (hence the emphasis on Exchange servers), and 4) recruit developers with the value prop of making money building apps on the API and selling them to enterprise customers.
I suspect the final product will look more like Google apps than it will gmail. And if the API is nice, they'll get developers, who will build unique apps, which in turn will convince enterprise customers to sign on. Acquiring customers will be especially easy if it doesn't require swapping out their email backends.
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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.
But _why_? Email does not seem RESTful to me. Not the slighest. Read an email and then flag it as unread? Save and delete instead of move? Batch operations that are not atomic? What happens when the connection breaks then? Synchronous command requests, really? IMAP solved that 20 years ago. Do we really want a glorified POP to replace it? What is the purpose?
"Move" is greatly simplified if "location" is a tag field like gmail rather than anything to do with filesystem storage.
The purpose would be building web apps that manipulate email.
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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.
While I can't think of a legal way to guarantee "not going away", you can legally guarantee a very strict privacy policy, good for 10 years counting from when the account was created. Future changes in privacy policy would not be able to cancel the 10 years promise, so any acquirer would be prevented from pushing ads. The acquirer could still kill the produce though.
The fact that so many companies who "plan to be around forever" haven't bothered to even think about these sorts of things indicates to me how fundamentally unseriously they take their own business.
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.
> Doesn't sound like a good idea? Then shut up. Please don't be aggressive like this on Hacker News. It violates the guidelines and degrades the discourse. That sentence has no information in it—it's just rude—so the comment would be better without it.
I think the comment created worthwhile conversation. And I'm not sure it would be better off without it. Obviously you can disagree, and given your position perhaps my opinion doesn't really matter, but to say it has no information is just being dishonest, and I say that in the nicest way possible.
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So, since you seem to be a developer on this -I'd like to ask: 1. If I run my own email server and do not have email addresses from yahoo, google, et al, how does this help me? 2. Is there a way to strip html off every incoming message, but retain the original intent of the formatting? 3. Is the API compatible with PGP? Can I enable PGP encryption at the server level? For example, say the client connected to the serv…
Sure, I'll run though these. You can also ping me at mg@inboxapp.com. 1. We just started with Gmail and Yahoo, and are working to support all IMAP servers. The sync engine currently depends on the CONDSTORE extension for performance, and not all servers have that extension enabled. What server are you running yourself? Dovecot? Cyrus? I'm sure we can get it working quickly-- we just didn't want to push support for se…
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Sure, I'll run though these. You can also ping me at mg@inboxapp.com. 1. We just started with Gmail and Yahoo, and are working to support all IMAP servers. The sync engine currently depends on the CONDSTORE extension for performance, and not all servers have that extension enabled. What server are you running yourself? Dovecot? Cyrus? I'm sure we can get it working quickly-- we just didn't want to push support for se…
Would it be possible to write something like an SMTP server that feeds directly into Inbox, no Dovecot/Cyrus/IMAP/POP3 required?