Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space?

Posted by efounders on Thursday February 27, 2014 @12:00PM
from the blog.frontapp.com dept.

http://blog.frontapp.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-innovate-in-the-e-mail-space/

( 5 comments | 12 points | on HN )

Re: Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space? by liamgooding on Thursday February 27, 2014 @01:17PM (#7313842)

I'm looking forward to seeing how Front stacks up when ready! :D Email clients seems to be a strange place where you can get acquired before you even launch... so maybe we'll never see a public product if you innovate too much! :D

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re: Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space? by M2Ys4U on Thursday February 27, 2014 @02:07PM (#7314212)

I'm surprised that Mailpile[0] wasn't mentioned at all. It's something that I'm watching very closely.

[0] https://www.mailpile.is/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re: Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space? by cissou on Thursday February 27, 2014 @12:08PM (#7313337)

Is there nothing to build on top of? A "e-mail" dev framework (open source if possible) with hooks so that you can focus on only front-end, or something similar?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re: Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space? by efounders on Thursday February 27, 2014 @12:19PM (#7313410)

that's an interesting question! The thing is that there is so much "plumbing" to do that a lot of the value is in the backend. Since it cannot be used by many many projects (we won't build thousands of email clients)the market for this open source model seems too small. My 2 cents.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re: Why is it so hard to innovate in the e-mail space? by beachminter on Thursday February 27, 2014 @03:41PM (#7314884)

Because Outlook is the devil.

[ Parent | on HN ]