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A comment on Show HN: Kanmail – An email client that functions like a kanban board. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Kanmail – An email client that functions like a ... by worble on Sunday April 26, 2020 @04:17PM (#22989862)
> Best case: you make a ton of money by selling to actual businesses (rather than annoying geeks and other weirdos who dare use uncommon clients); slightly-worse case: you sell it to MS.

And worst case: MS change how things work and block this sort of thing happening again. You now have a bunch of angry customers with a hack that doesn't work.

I'm no lawyer, so I'd also check the legal implications of selling something that builds on top and modifies Microsofts application without their explicit consent.

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Re:Show HN: Kanmail – An email client that functions like a ... by wildmusings on Sunday April 26, 2020 @04:32PM (#22990007)
There's a big market for Office add-ins. API docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/outlook/...
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Re:Show HN: Kanmail – An email client that functions like a ... by toyg on Sunday April 26, 2020 @05:01PM (#22990223)
Add-ons are allowed, even welcomed by MS.

Of course, the trade-offs of "sharecropping" on someone else's platform are always there, from a strategic point of view. MS can wake up one day and rewrite Outlook in Rust, forcing you to rewrite from scratch or making it impossible in practice. But it's a possibility much more remote, imho, than the chance of making significant money with yet another exotic mail client.

[ Parent | on HN ]