I bought Mailbird because it looked amazing and had the feature set I wanted. It has done its job extremely well, and I'm very happy with it. But it doesn't have a Linux client; it's only for Windows.
I have six active email addresses spread across multiple providers - Office365, Exchange, Gmail, GSuite, and Zoho. I need a central place to read it all.
I've seen Hiri mentioned before, but dismissed it because it doesn't support Google/IMAP. Once it adds that support, it has my attention, and potentially my dollars.
It's not moving focus away from Linux/Office365 but it accommodates people that want to have their Gmail accounts in the same client as their Office 365 / Exchange accounts.
Another reason for wanting a client that works with Exchange and Google is simply wanting to use the same app both at work and at home, even if you never cross the streams and access them both from the same instance.
And as others have mentioned, Linux email clients suck. I'm a huge proponent of open-source software, and prefer free clients wherever possible. No one has made a free email client that I can tolerate. They're so bad that I tend to stick to web clients. Hiri's client reminds me of Polymail on MacOS, which is the only non-game, non-cloud application I've paid for in the past decade.
That doesn't seem like a great idea, on many levels.
The value proposition just isn't there with all of the free options already out there.
There's only a handful of Exchange clients for *NIX though, that I agree with.
I don’t understand the link between your second sentence and the first one. How not having IMAP support forces you to have multiple email clients open at the same time?
After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP.
Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem.
As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General purpose you're going to be in the sea of tons of other email clients, most of which are free. It's going to dilute the value proposition for Hiri because Hiri is going to become "another email client" that also supports exchange. The taste for email clients that add exchange support is not generally a good experience. It also means that you have to ensure all of your UI elements work equally with both, bringing you to more of a lowest-common-denominator experience.
When I see Linux Exchange Email Client and that's all you do, I see specialty software that I can rely on to solve that problem correctly. When I worked at a company that used Exchange, I would have bought it IMMEDIATELY and convinced my boss to reimburse me later.
As soon as you become a general purpose email client, everything about what you offer to solve that problem starts getting lost in the shuffle.