It's hard to make money in that space, yes.<p>I've considered merging mail and messaging, so that email protocols are used to do the things people do with instant messaging, Telegram and such. The first step is to get away from queuing mail.<p>A first step is a new kind of mail forwarder, one for machines that don't have local mailboxes (which is most non-mail servers). It acts as an SMTP server and client. When an email comes in, and the sender reaches the end of the DATA section, the forwarder checks its forwarding list to see where this mail is supposed to go. It opens a SMTP connection to the destination and sends the email. The incoming SMTP connection is held open while this is in progress. Any problems are reported back to the sender immediately with an SMTP status code. There are no bounce emails, no queuing, and no possibility of joe-jobs. All mail is handled immediately or rejected immediately. (This only applies to single-address messages, and only to "To" addresses. Everything else is bulk.)<p>The next step is an IMAP server which has the same immediate orientation. When it gets an incoming email, it sends a push notification to any connected clients, while holding the incoming connection open. If at least one client is responding, a SMTP success status is returned. Otherwise, you get some status such as 251 (User Not Local, Will Forward.)<p>Then, a threaded email client. It would help to have the convention that an email with subject but no text, text but no subject, or text the same as subject is displayed like an instant message.<p>All of these can be done independently, and are backwards-compatible. If you have all of them, email is equivalent to instant messaging - you can tell if it was delivered, it goes through immediately, and it works like a conversation.<p>Of course, there's no big-money startup in this.
Nice article. But I think there are a few other things they missed out that make building an email client so difficult:<p>1. Consistency. Okay, this is always going to be a problem, since rendering anything more than plain text in emails is a minefield that makes the bad old days of Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator look like a utopia. But people still expect their Amazon/eBay/Google/whatever account/confirmation emails to look decent, so you have to figure out a basic HTML parser as well. And then try and make it somewhat work with people who are designing their messages with stuff like Outlook's Microsoft Word engine in mind.<p>2. Spam. I'm surprised this wasn't really mentioned in the article, but it's arguably the biggest issue any email provider, client developer or email server software maker has to deal with. You have to make sure your software can figure out what messages are unwanted, then either send them to the spam folder or delete them. Most startups don't have to figure that out, since their systems are closed and spam prevention can be done on sign up. Not so much if you're building an email client where any Tom, Dick or Harry can send messages to anyone with no real way to verify if they're human or not.<p>So yeah, few other issues.
I'm trying to build an email platform too, yes it's hard. But I thought it was only because I'm a beginner and 1 man team.<p>Some of the reasons why I think it's hard:<p>* I don't think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation on this and it felt like I was venturing into territory never before seen.<p>* Parsing emails to be display correctly seems impossible. Sometimes emails have "<br>" in them and sometimes they have "\n". But what if the "\n" doesn't mean newline but it's just what someone wrote in the email? They come in a variety of mime types and formats. It sometimes seems impossible to do this.<p>* Not everyone uses the RFC standards! I thought the RFC said that a subject can only be 78 chars long. Yet I get emails all day long that go way beyond this which cause major problems in my code. AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE THAT CARES ABOUT RFCS?
At a very high level, email is primarily used for discussions. With this view, successful innovation in the e-mail space requires innovation in the nature of discussions themselves. Tinkering around with better usability or feature improvements will not be sufficient to overcome the massive inertia of 'traditional e-mail'.<p>We are a startup that just launched (<a href="https://tmail21.com" rel="nofollow">https://tmail21.com</a>) that aims to rethink the discussion itself. In our view, one of the major problems of e-mail (and chat for that matter) is that the discussions are not goal-oriented. So, discussions/threads can meander around with no outcome or accountability.<p>So, we enhance the notion of discussions to be goal-oriented.<p>Now, once one has the notion of goal-oriented discussions, a natural next step is to evolve a goal-oriented discussion into a Lean Process (which is basically a goal-oriented discussion with more structure) . Examples of a Lean Process might be a Blog Article process, a Product Deployment Process, a Feature Design Process, an Issue Escalation Process etc.<p>We've done all this in an email-LIKE interface. I guess we'll leave it to others to decide whether this constitutes innovation in the e-mail space :)
There are tons of reasons why this is so hard. Leaving aside all of those there are 2 that I see as the biggest:<p>* A 100x improvement over current email is needed for a switch.<p>* It has to be 100x cheaper than the current product.<p>While you can't multiply by 0 and I meant that facetiously, users won't pay for the software or only niche consumers. Which is why email providers that get paid focus on things like security, collaboration and and backup. These products are essentially 90% other things and 10% email. examples:<p>* dropbox
* slack
* telegram
* silent circle
* sms<p>obviously I am not going to name everything in the space. I can't think of a company that has email at it's core. maybe 'hushmail' or some small encrypted mail providers but what profitable business is at it's core an email provider
Why are messages separated by transport? That is, why are messages sent to/from me via one transport (e.g., SMTP) read and composed in one application, and those sent via another transport (e.g., SMS, Twitter) read and composed in another? Why, as a user, do I give %#@%! what the underlying transport is?<p>I think the focus on a particular technology (SMTP) rather than a service (messaging) is why email clients don't advance. Bizarrely, three other transports often are integrated into email clients: NNTP, voicemail, and fax. I can only guess that it's because of a completely arbitrary reason: They are older.<p>Probably chat clients should also be integrated. I should be able to send my contacts an instant or time-shifted message.
It will be easier to build a new email spec that's more feasible/modern with security built in mind than it is to build a sustainable email client that tries to comply with various email services (GMail is the worst offender for not being consistent with IMAP spec).<p>Mailmate is my fav OS X client that focues more on power user features but it has a boring classic interface which doesn't bother me at all. Despite having integration support with SMIME/PGP, Markdown reply, powerful search features, and so on that makes me productive, the only thing I hear when I recommend this to other people is that its UI is ugly. :|
Isn't this taking a somewhat narrow definition of "the e-mail space"? Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. all seem like successful innovations that lots of people use to communicate instead of email.
The biggest problem is that E-mail demography tends to be broader than many of the other services.<p>Some of E-mail users are very conservative and specific about how they handle their E-mail. (Some of which are very risky behavior, which I actually tried to correct by explaining why that's bad idea, but ultmately given up...)<p>There are demography between novice and expert. Novices tend to not care about changes so much; some even won't notice changes, as long as features are somehow accessible. Experts may have some particular tastes, but they'd be quick to find solutions to change things around when they have to. But people in between tend to be very vocal about any changes and they can't (or not willing) to find and accept "solutions" -- they will be the first one to complain when UI elements like buttons shift around the screen. Unfortunately, as universal E-mail gets, a lot of E-mail users fall under category. (Though, in different ways, "experts" can be very particular about how they handle things can be very stubborn when there's no good reason presented to change -- but it's a bit different context.)<p>I can't even imagine how tough it will be to migrate some of people I know to anything other than what they are used to.
As the article mentions Unibox: If somebody is interested in giving the beta version of Unibox for iOS a try, send me an email: lasse.jansen@eightloops.com.<p>Unibox groups emails by person. It's different, but it really helps you staying organized.<p><a href="https://www.uniboxapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.uniboxapp.com</a>
Such a great timing for this post, as Dropbox announced that they are shutting down Mailbox: <a href="https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-carousel-and-mailbox/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-...</a>
E-mail as a paradigm has been optimized about as far as it can be. We need a new paradigm. It shouldn't look like e-mail.<p>Google Wave was an attempt, but the chemistry wasn't right. Someone one will find the right mix...
Why do people blog about what their company is building without so much as mentioning the name of their company or product or even a hyperlink?<p>In the author profile at the very bottom of the page, in small letters, there is a URL (but not a link) to<p><a href="https://frontapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://frontapp.com/</a><p>and the email client the author works on is apparently called Front. But why should her readers ever care about that?