> "The market that we're going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work accounts,"
I'm glad they're only aiming at a small group of people who actually have problems with email. The weekly "re-invent email" posts are getting quite tiresome, the majority of people have absolutely no problem with email, email is an incredibly simple concept and it works for almost everyone.
I dunno, for most people in corp environment it is a total nightmare mish-mash of to-do list, calendar, notes, and assorted hate mail from their bosses.
In short, email is fucking awful and the bane of my existence. At one point I was getting north of 200 emails a day from people demanding meetings, todos, updates, and pieces of information. Please someone... reinvent it!
I see it rather that way - for my case, I have few problems with email. Email is mostly ok, but it sucks to exchange files, and it is a pain to visualize thread. Also, the whole history shouldn't hang on each email. Fix that and you would have fixed email for me.
I agree with the small target group approach in any way.
People do not need this and will not leave their existing email clients because they simply do not see email as being 'stagnated'. It works and gets the job done.
There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them.
My advice to you would be to go build on top of for example gmail. There are massive number of things that suck horribly. Yes, search is one of them.
Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work.
The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com
Did you even read the article, or did you just come here to toot your own horn? All of your "advice" is exactly addressed by Fluent, e.g. built on top of Gmail, better search, better inbox navigation, and better attachment handling.
I have no idea how successful Fluent will be at all those things, but it's just peculiar when a site says "we're tackling problems x, y, and z" and you come along and say, "your ideas suck, try addressing problems x, y, and z instead."
Oh and I forgot to mention this is horribly expensive to scale.
We calculated that it cost us about 1.20 euro do keep this up per user per month. And mind you these costs were primarily network bound so it doesn't matter if you have faster hardware.
There are some optimization techniques you can do to bring this down (for example use imap push) but with gmail you are looking at about 2K connections per IP, you do the math.
Actually you can do this (and we are doing this through partners) on the cheap but the experience you can provide will not be appealing unless it is an add-on experience on an existing product.
I use Sparrow and I agree. It manages to make communication by email so lightweight and fun again, but it lacks the stream that Fluent has. I'm very excited to explore Fluent as well.
The stream view is an interesting concept, but we've found that many people don't have a nice inbox of messages as shown in the preview. In fact, it's quite the opposite: messages from friends, family, and coworkers are often overwhelmed by notifications, newsletters, and mailing lists. However, your Amazon shipping and Twitter notifications aren't spam, you just don't want to see them in the same context.
I'm working on Glider (http://glider.io), a fix for the mess in your inbox. You already know which kinds of emails are important to you, so instead of obscuring that information, we think the best solution is to sort and display emails by sender and context.
A word of advise: Asking me to give you access to my email account is a very big leap of trust. I can't see what your product does without taking that leap - so I don't.
As an Australian (who hasn't lived there for decades) nothing gives me a case of cultural-cringe more than these sorts of articles from the Australian tech scene, which appear to be intended solely to pitch the "Australian"-ness of the individuals involved to the world.
Did they really have to editorialize and verb 'action' to make you sound cool? I think not. But, we have to 'sell the cool', right, SMH? I think this was a fail - it really makes you appear idiotic to say things like "action that email". Cringe++.
Besides that tender point, the idea of presenting ones email as a stream is an interesting - but not new - idea. I'd be rather more happy to see this idea, which in my opinion ought to be implemented as a GUI control for all mail clients possible, evolve into Mail.app and other mail clients.
That sounds so much like American corpspeak that if I didn't know better I'd accuse these guys of being what you guys call "yank-offs".
Granted, you'd still be branded a corporate douche for actually talking like that straight-facedly here in the US; but "actionable" is live jargon and actually used by even savvy manager-types.
I must seriously not have the same problems. With gmail spam filters and priority inbox the last thing I need is to visualize my e-mails in a twitter like stream.
I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails me something akin to a personal letter.
I like it how it is because filters and sensible organising of inboxes is not hard.
Not interested in email streams at all. I'd prefer to keep streams for the kind of information that doesn't require action or response frequently per item. Emails often require action or attention, and it's far better they exist as subject line items in a date-ordered list for easy retrieval, sorting and archiving all at once.
standard gripe about technologies being declared "dead" merely because they are no longer growing, rather than because they are suffering from a vanishingly tiny user-base
Technologies that are no longer growing tend to result in cost-cutting, leading to engineers in the US and Europe getting laid off for offshoring. So "if it's not growing, it's dead" is actually a rather good approximation of the status quo.
The attachment feature alone is a something I would pay for; I deeply miss Xoopit an we'll-organize-your-attachments plugin which gave my inbox a life. I also like how you can view message and reply without having to go to a new page. The only problem I see is it's taking me away from my comfort zone (gmail).
We've been thinking hard about innovating email. Interestingly, I don't think reading the emails is where the real problems are, its in composing the emails.
What I'd really like to see is a P2P, encrypted, bittorrent-based mail system, basically something that works similar to bitcoin, but used for sending encrypted mail instead.
No central servers, just a single blockchain recording all encrypted messages on the network and shared over a bittorrent network, and an easy-to-use client that doesn't make normal people think too hard.
Encrypt a message with your recipient's public key, submit it to the network, it's accepted into the blockchain, and they decrypt it on the other end with their private key when the msg propagates to their client. Private (at least until computing power catches up with the encryption algorithm), decentralized email without ads, popups, etc.
Give it a nice Apple-ish/fluent.io-ish/sparrow-ish interface, transparent encrypting and decrypting, and some way of optionally associating email addresses with public keys so normal users don't have deal with intimidating hashes (optional only though, still want the ability to send directly to more anonymous public keys).
While you'd still need some method of preventing block chain forking, you wouldn't have to worry as much about double spending and transaction verification since you don't care whether someone sends the same message multiple times to different recipients (as you do with bitcoin).
One of the biggest problems would be dealing with exponentially increasing blockchain size. Bitcoin already has this problem and its transactions consist only of relatively terse amounts of data. With full emails (and attachments?) you'd have to implement a method of cropping and perhaps archiving the blockchain, or otherwise solving that problem, or it will quickly become unweildy and destroy the user experience (esp for people with slow connections).
Perhaps clients store the blockchain a certain number of blocks back, and then beyond that they only store their own sent and received messages? Not sure...
The genius of bitcoin is that it is a solution to a difficult algorithmic problem in distributed systems [1] which can be repurposed for other implementations. It is already being repurposed for a distributed DNS [2] and distributed voting systems for elections [3], why not a distributed encrypted email system as well?
Just throwing this out there without really thinking it through thoroughly atm... Thoughts? Feasible? Probably the biggest problem is knowing that one day all your emails would essentially become public domain when hardware catches up...
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a distributed decision problem...
But seriously, this would not scale. Using a central block chain as you suggest means that every node in the system receives a copy of every email. It's also trivial to DOS - just send tons of multi-megabyte messages to nonexistent receivers. The messages hang around in the block chain forever and the entire system dies.
Email is not a decision problem (unlike bitcoin, or potentially a DNS replacement). It is a delivery problem, and is local in nature. There are no global decisions to be made, unlike in bitcoin - there's just a sender and a receiver, and they need to find each other to exchange the message. Once they do, nobody else needs to know about any of this.
When you view things in that light, SMTP is a reasonable protocol for the job. It just lacks sender authentication, hence the spam problem, and is cleartext-by-default. It also relies on the DNS protocol for endpoint location, and is a 7bit protocol (making attachments needlessly inefficient). All of these things can be fixed without any kind of radical change to the protocol; just tack on a DHT (keyed on recipient public key hash?) for endpoint location, mandate 8bit-cleanliness, authenticate the sender somehow (this is a HUGE problem and one your hash chain system also fails to address), and mandate encryption.
If you want to also mask IP addresses as well, just toss in a standard mixnet, such as tor or I2P. This gives you endpoint location for free, as well.
As for sender authentication, mandating message signatures is an easy first step, but authenticating the sender key is a hard problem (key management always is). You need to have some kind of vetting process or spammers will just mint millions of keys; but at the same time people like to receive messages from people they haven't exchanged keys with. This here is the fundamental problem with spam, and not one that any purely technical solution can fix.
Email per se doesn't have centralised servers. You can run your own. The only registration issues (DNS) are related to addressing (your server needs to be able to find the destination to send the email).
Your proposal basically sends all email to everyone (encrypted), which avoid the need for a DNS entry.
That model already exists, it's NNTP (a.k.a USENET). This basically sends an email (RFC822 body) to all participating servers in an efficient 'flood fill'. (A usenet post is almost identical to an email body).
So PGP+NNTP gives you the protocol side of what you want today.
The issue will be that "sending all email to everyone" probably won't scale, for NNTP or your system.
You would lose interop with existing email infrastructure. the problem is that hosted email brings everything back to being too centralized (for eg. most of the email I send doesn't leave the google servers). Take a product that implements its own smtp server, nice PGP integration and a nice interface over it like the one in OP. users may be more likely to want something like that (I know I do - I can't wait to switch away from Gmail) rather than an entirely re-invented messaging system.
This is an amazing idea. I have been thinking how to do webmail + proper privacy for ages. By proper I mean it ought to completely cryptographically protect participants from any kind of orwellian search and seizure policy as well as just fix the inherent problems of plaintext storage in e-mail. I don't even think that hardware catching up to the main crypted spool is really an issue as we're well past the point where we can use encryption algorithms requiring computationally infeasible energy to decrypt by bruteforce, even granting absolutely unlimited compute resources.
The only problem I could see with this is one bitcoin will also eventually run into, but even moreso, which is scale. Average email size is going to be a lot larger than your average bitcoin transaction. That said there may be ways around it, perhaps using the usenet infrastructure as an underlying transport mechanism and piggybacking off that. It already has ridiculous amounts of data flowing through and being stored on it. Something to think on more, thanks for chiming in.
Problem: instead of having to sniff my servers' connections, an attacker (say, a government) can just download the blockchain - which is easily accessible - to have a list of everyone who has sent me email and everyone I've sent email to.
Besides, what's the point of the blockchain there anyway? Why not just have a distributed naming system (like namecoin) for the addresses and then simply integrate an MTA with the client, allowing simple P2P between users?
Good idea, but I personally don't want to have to download and process terabytes (petabytes?) of data every day in order to be able to read a few kilobytes of my own email.
Maybe in a few decades time when it's normal for people to have static IPv6 allocations and permanently online machines in their homes, it will be trivial for people to run their own mail systems using existing protocols.
My new take on email: leave it alone and go fix something that's actually broken.
I'll take an open source clone of Gmail, thank you very much, especially as they continue messing with the interface for the sake of it and with the privacy policy for kicks.
While we're at it, I'll also take an implementation of conversations in ThunderBird, to make it more like Sparrow, which is quite nice on the desktop.
The best thing Gmail has going for it are the shortcuts. They're the best feature for ripping through an email backlog. I hope anybody working on an email client includes shortcuts for everything. Once you get used to them, it's painful touching your mouse.
Is it my imagination or is this a lot like the vision for Mozilla Raindrop. I was quite disappointed that they started talking about it and then stopped work on it almost at the same time. The ability to pump all of your messaging into a single client and have it prioritise what was important seemed a no-brainer to me.
I'd love to have rss/tweets/fb/g+ updates alongside emails for people I care about rather than maintaining increasingly complex methods of keeping up to date with each in different apps
To me, this looks like webmail to read webmail. Pretty though. I doubt I'll use it, as it's another entity to trust with my privacy. If it was a replacement for Gmail entirely I'd consider it.
I'm still searching for a decent desktop email client, something that looks like this and works on both Windows 7 and Mac OSX. It's a shame that this is a web app, it doesn't solve any problem that I have.
Slick interface and the instant search makes me want to use the product.
But I like and trust email because it is stagnate. How is this different than Buzz (dead) or my other 'streams' like G+/Facebook/Twitter? I don't want my email to be a stream, because if I miss one, that could be devastating. I don't want email to evolve, because it is the only thing I can trust that won't become realtime.
If the mail is still hosted at google, hosted in the USA with all the government snooping and extreme paranoia and everyone is out to get us attitude, with the NSA, CIA and whatever other corporate/government crime syndicate reading it, then it fails to fix the biggest flaw in gmail. And that is the lack of privacy.
Looking at these comments it seems I am the only one blown away by this. It's amazing! Email for the social network generation. We've become accustomed to feeds, and for a good reason: it's efficient.
The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more is such a great time-saving feature.
[+] [-] citricsquid|14 years ago|reply
I'm glad they're only aiming at a small group of people who actually have problems with email. The weekly "re-invent email" posts are getting quite tiresome, the majority of people have absolutely no problem with email, email is an incredibly simple concept and it works for almost everyone.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|14 years ago|reply
In short, email is fucking awful and the bane of my existence. At one point I was getting north of 200 emails a day from people demanding meetings, todos, updates, and pieces of information. Please someone... reinvent it!
[+] [-] maigret|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waseemsadiq|14 years ago|reply
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-commun...
And here is the desktop client which is now open-source: http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg
People do not need this and will not leave their existing email clients because they simply do not see email as being 'stagnated'. It works and gets the job done.
There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them.
My advice to you would be to go build on top of for example gmail. There are massive number of things that suck horribly. Yes, search is one of them.
Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work.
The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com
[+] [-] GnomeChomsky|14 years ago|reply
I have no idea how successful Fluent will be at all those things, but it's just peculiar when a site says "we're tackling problems x, y, and z" and you come along and say, "your ideas suck, try addressing problems x, y, and z instead."
[+] [-] waseemsadiq|14 years ago|reply
We calculated that it cost us about 1.20 euro do keep this up per user per month. And mind you these costs were primarily network bound so it doesn't matter if you have faster hardware.
There are some optimization techniques you can do to bring this down (for example use imap push) but with gmail you are looking at about 2K connections per IP, you do the math.
Actually you can do this (and we are doing this through partners) on the cheap but the experience you can provide will not be appealing unless it is an add-on experience on an existing product.
[+] [-] Volpe|14 years ago|reply
Looks very inspired by by Sparrow.app [2](OS X mail application). Though they have improved on the UI in some aspects.
Great that people are still trying to make email better.
[1] http://fluent.io
[2] http://sparrowmailapp.com/
[+] [-] tedmiston|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maro|14 years ago|reply
It was slow and had some UX quirks/bugs.
For a time I fired it up every once in a while as an email-backup solution, but I got lazy so I don't even do that now.
[+] [-] liuhenry|14 years ago|reply
The stream view is an interesting concept, but we've found that many people don't have a nice inbox of messages as shown in the preview. In fact, it's quite the opposite: messages from friends, family, and coworkers are often overwhelmed by notifications, newsletters, and mailing lists. However, your Amazon shipping and Twitter notifications aren't spam, you just don't want to see them in the same context.
I'm working on Glider (http://glider.io), a fix for the mess in your inbox. You already know which kinds of emails are important to you, so instead of obscuring that information, we think the best solution is to sort and display emails by sender and context.
We did a soft launch on HN a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519917), and would love to know what you guys think. Good luck as well to the Fluent team!
[+] [-] troels|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
Really? Really?
I expect better from my fellow Australians, even if they are Sydney-siders.
[+] [-] dhanji|14 years ago|reply
However, we'll try to live up to Australian standards better in the future =)
[+] [-] seclorum|14 years ago|reply
Did they really have to editorialize and verb 'action' to make you sound cool? I think not. But, we have to 'sell the cool', right, SMH? I think this was a fail - it really makes you appear idiotic to say things like "action that email". Cringe++.
Besides that tender point, the idea of presenting ones email as a stream is an interesting - but not new - idea. I'd be rather more happy to see this idea, which in my opinion ought to be implemented as a GUI control for all mail clients possible, evolve into Mail.app and other mail clients.
[+] [-] bitwize|14 years ago|reply
Granted, you'd still be branded a corporate douche for actually talking like that straight-facedly here in the US; but "actionable" is live jargon and actually used by even savvy manager-types.
[+] [-] jtchang|14 years ago|reply
I must seriously not have the same problems. With gmail spam filters and priority inbox the last thing I need is to visualize my e-mails in a twitter like stream.
I can't be the only one one that jumps for joy when someone actually e-mails me something akin to a personal letter.
[+] [-] BillPosters|14 years ago|reply
I like it how it is because filters and sensible organising of inboxes is not hard.
Not interested in email streams at all. I'd prefer to keep streams for the kind of information that doesn't require action or response frequently per item. Emails often require action or attention, and it's far better they exist as subject line items in a date-ordered list for easy retrieval, sorting and archiving all at once.
[+] [-] cellularmitosis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|14 years ago|reply
The article revolves around email having stagnated, which pretty nicely fits the "no longer growing" part.
[+] [-] ootachi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelneale|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tawheed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|14 years ago|reply
No central servers, just a single blockchain recording all encrypted messages on the network and shared over a bittorrent network, and an easy-to-use client that doesn't make normal people think too hard.
Encrypt a message with your recipient's public key, submit it to the network, it's accepted into the blockchain, and they decrypt it on the other end with their private key when the msg propagates to their client. Private (at least until computing power catches up with the encryption algorithm), decentralized email without ads, popups, etc.
Give it a nice Apple-ish/fluent.io-ish/sparrow-ish interface, transparent encrypting and decrypting, and some way of optionally associating email addresses with public keys so normal users don't have deal with intimidating hashes (optional only though, still want the ability to send directly to more anonymous public keys).
While you'd still need some method of preventing block chain forking, you wouldn't have to worry as much about double spending and transaction verification since you don't care whether someone sends the same message multiple times to different recipients (as you do with bitcoin).
One of the biggest problems would be dealing with exponentially increasing blockchain size. Bitcoin already has this problem and its transactions consist only of relatively terse amounts of data. With full emails (and attachments?) you'd have to implement a method of cropping and perhaps archiving the blockchain, or otherwise solving that problem, or it will quickly become unweildy and destroy the user experience (esp for people with slow connections).
Perhaps clients store the blockchain a certain number of blocks back, and then beyond that they only store their own sent and received messages? Not sure...
The genius of bitcoin is that it is a solution to a difficult algorithmic problem in distributed systems [1] which can be repurposed for other implementations. It is already being repurposed for a distributed DNS [2] and distributed voting systems for elections [3], why not a distributed encrypted email system as well?
Just throwing this out there without really thinking it through thoroughly atm... Thoughts? Feasible? Probably the biggest problem is knowing that one day all your emails would essentially become public domain when hardware catches up...
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Origi...
2. http://dot-bit.org/
3. ddg-fu failing me atm, will add this later.
[+] [-] bdonlan|14 years ago|reply
But seriously, this would not scale. Using a central block chain as you suggest means that every node in the system receives a copy of every email. It's also trivial to DOS - just send tons of multi-megabyte messages to nonexistent receivers. The messages hang around in the block chain forever and the entire system dies.
Email is not a decision problem (unlike bitcoin, or potentially a DNS replacement). It is a delivery problem, and is local in nature. There are no global decisions to be made, unlike in bitcoin - there's just a sender and a receiver, and they need to find each other to exchange the message. Once they do, nobody else needs to know about any of this.
When you view things in that light, SMTP is a reasonable protocol for the job. It just lacks sender authentication, hence the spam problem, and is cleartext-by-default. It also relies on the DNS protocol for endpoint location, and is a 7bit protocol (making attachments needlessly inefficient). All of these things can be fixed without any kind of radical change to the protocol; just tack on a DHT (keyed on recipient public key hash?) for endpoint location, mandate 8bit-cleanliness, authenticate the sender somehow (this is a HUGE problem and one your hash chain system also fails to address), and mandate encryption.
If you want to also mask IP addresses as well, just toss in a standard mixnet, such as tor or I2P. This gives you endpoint location for free, as well.
As for sender authentication, mandating message signatures is an easy first step, but authenticating the sender key is a hard problem (key management always is). You need to have some kind of vetting process or spammers will just mint millions of keys; but at the same time people like to receive messages from people they haven't exchanged keys with. This here is the fundamental problem with spam, and not one that any purely technical solution can fix.
[+] [-] jbert|14 years ago|reply
Your proposal basically sends all email to everyone (encrypted), which avoid the need for a DNS entry.
That model already exists, it's NNTP (a.k.a USENET). This basically sends an email (RFC822 body) to all participating servers in an efficient 'flood fill'. (A usenet post is almost identical to an email body).
So PGP+NNTP gives you the protocol side of what you want today.
The issue will be that "sending all email to everyone" probably won't scale, for NNTP or your system.
[+] [-] __alexs|14 years ago|reply
Namecoin's .bit domains already support Tor. Throw in some S/MIME or PGP on the actual messages and you're mostly done I think.
Other than the sexy UI of course :)
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etherael|14 years ago|reply
The only problem I could see with this is one bitcoin will also eventually run into, but even moreso, which is scale. Average email size is going to be a lot larger than your average bitcoin transaction. That said there may be ways around it, perhaps using the usenet infrastructure as an underlying transport mechanism and piggybacking off that. It already has ridiculous amounts of data flowing through and being stored on it. Something to think on more, thanks for chiming in.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
Besides, what's the point of the blockchain there anyway? Why not just have a distributed naming system (like namecoin) for the addresses and then simply integrate an MTA with the client, allowing simple P2P between users?
[+] [-] steve-howard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|14 years ago|reply
Maybe in a few decades time when it's normal for people to have static IPv6 allocations and permanently online machines in their homes, it will be trivial for people to run their own mail systems using existing protocols.
[+] [-] vetler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tga|14 years ago|reply
I'll take an open source clone of Gmail, thank you very much, especially as they continue messing with the interface for the sake of it and with the privacy policy for kicks.
While we're at it, I'll also take an implementation of conversations in ThunderBird, to make it more like Sparrow, which is quite nice on the desktop.
[+] [-] johnx123-up|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twakefield|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nash|14 years ago|reply
That is how you rip through thousands of emails in insanely short times. Much MUCH faster then gmail.
[+] [-] meiji|14 years ago|reply
I'd love to have rss/tweets/fb/g+ updates alongside emails for people I care about rather than maintaining increasingly complex methods of keeping up to date with each in different apps
[+] [-] antonyh|14 years ago|reply
I'm still searching for a decent desktop email client, something that looks like this and works on both Windows 7 and Mac OSX. It's a shame that this is a web app, it doesn't solve any problem that I have.
[+] [-] marknadal|14 years ago|reply
But I like and trust email because it is stagnate. How is this different than Buzz (dead) or my other 'streams' like G+/Facebook/Twitter? I don't want my email to be a stream, because if I miss one, that could be devastating. I don't want email to evolve, because it is the only thing I can trust that won't become realtime.
[+] [-] retrogradeorbit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxman1|14 years ago|reply
The feature where a panel slides in from the right allowing you to view more is such a great time-saving feature.
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
Great UI, I love the attention they paid to some details.
[+] [-] chrislloyd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxman1|14 years ago|reply