Its really hard to set up an email host, I have tried doing it myself and it was really too crazy to set up. I had a problem where I was serving email across about 40 domains and I needed something that would work for everyones different DNS settings.<p>So we outsourced, got it done but its still very clunky, its hard to administrate and monitor and I couldn't build on top of it.<p>I was thinking of maybe building an API service where people can build their own email hosts really easily without buying hardware, getting a system admin etc.<p>If you dont know, IMAP and POP are so hard to work with programmatically but if you had an API where you just ask for /users/134234/mailbox and got all your data, you pretty much just cut out 2 months of programming.<p>Plus: People could build apps on top, like shopify
Plus: We wont have to rely on google anymore!
Plus: Google doesn't seem to let you do this or anything similar, I might be mistaken though.<p>Just to clarify, this is not a transactional email service, its a fully hosted imap server.<p>Thanks!
It's not clear where you're trying to innovate here. IMAP mailboxes on my domains are hosted by Rackspace Mail [1] at $1/mailbox/month. I don't use any other Rackspace services, just point my MX records there so I don't have to manage mail servers and spam filtering myself.<p>Where I need an API for both inbound and outbound mail, there's SendGrid and SendGrid Parse [2], among others.<p>1: <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/</a><p>2: <a href="http://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Webhooks/parse.html" rel="nofollow">http://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Webhooks/parse.html</a>
The problem is that mail-clients speak IMAP - if you present your own new API you'll need to wrap it in an IMAP-presentation layer before anything can use it.<p>Sure the simple case of reading/polling/creating mails is not difficult, so your API idea seems attractive initially. But when you say setting up IMAP is hard I suspect you're getting in over your head - IMAP is not hard, even at scale, certainly not compared to writing a damn IMAP-server (I've done it.)<p>(PS. Besides your API will need more granularity than "GET /user/foo/mailbox" because my mailbox is <i>very very large</i>.)