DISQUS

Brij Singh · 2 years ago

Chris,

Great post. Its great to see wonderful line-up of innovative startups tackling email problem (and in some cases new opportunity).

At MessageDance, we are also addressing big problem related to email. Would be happy to share more about MessageDance when we are ready with the launch. For now folks can sign up for the private beta.

Brij
www.messagedance.com

Janice Friedman · 2 years ago

Zimbra's not webmail? That's news to me. I actually started using it about a month ago, having signed up for a personal account (01.com) with the idea of forwarding mail from my gmail account to my zimbra account, so that I could sync outlook. For a few bucks a month, this was a pretty good solution to having my cake and eating it too... online Google, offline Outlook... the punch line here is that the Zimbra web interface searches about as well as Google, at least to a non-expert like myself, and is faster than Outlook for me on my admitedly tired old PC, so, now I'm pretty much in the Zimbra webmail all the time. I'm reluctant to dump gmail cause everyone has my gmail address, so I haven't gone all the way. Given that my Zimbra provider has reachable support, I'm feeling pretty smug, though.

Chris Morrison · 2 years ago

Good point, Janice. The browser-based AJAX client is what Zimbra has been pushing. I should have said it's not your standard web mail; it's certainly a lot different from what I was referring to, Gmail. Updating to be a bit more clear, thanks.

Bill Barlow · 2 years ago

Good article.

I question this line tho:
"However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use"

The author doesn't cite any reasons.

They obviously haven't used Zimbra or read up on their blog. The developed a GMail skin. . .

But that aside, I don't want another Yahoo or GMail client.

Fred Pohl · 2 years ago

Ads, what about ads, animations, bright colors and annoyances?
Is any of these new email clients ADD (attention deficit disorder) aware?

DV Henkel-Wallace · 2 years ago

Chris, I'm glad to see a post with depth and analysis. Most VB (and other blog) posts aren't much more than the press release with maybe a sentence or two. It's hard to do more when you want to stay current with a stream of new companies. Frankly most of those are ephemeral, so not so interesting. This kind of segment-focused piece, thankfully less than a magazine article, is just what I would prefer to see on VB.

Chris Morrison · 2 years ago

Bill: Simple reason. The average person who decides they might want a Zimbra account won't know where to go. It's not terribly difficult, but it's not entirely straightforward, either. Take a look at the Zimbra homepage to see what I mean.

Fred: Fuser and Orgoo both have a couple ads, but they're not very intense. Both companies say they don't intend to load up on ads. I'd tend to trust them, but could be wrong. Not sure what you mean about ADD aware.

DV: Thanks for the feedback. We're hoping to do this sort of post more often, now.

John · 2 years ago

“If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”

Why focus on a subset of America? This is email, it's not like you are limited to retail outlets. What about the rest of the entire world? How narrow-minded!

Chris Morrison · 2 years ago

John: You slipped in right after my last reply -- that subject did come up with Fuser. The simple answer for them (and any small company) is that they've got a limited budget, and it behooves them to focus on the most obvious and familiar market.

Ray Grieselhuber · 2 years ago

I see a lot of value in these sorts of services.

The ability to have all of my email accounts in one place on the web is the primary reason I use GMail, but it's not perfect and I don't always have a warm and fuzzy feeling about giving Google so much data.

Best wishes to all involved - I'm sure I'll be trying one or two out in the near future.

Mike J · 2 years ago

While as a CS i find it important that innovation is kept chugging forward, i have to say that what i gathered from the above article, there are already programs that do exactly what these innovations intend. the catch is that i find that these existing programs allow for these concepts to be handled more, at least i think, intuitively than organizing everything into a single communal catchall.
take Pidgin, for example. this is an open source program that is developed for people, by people, for absolutely free, and none of the ad or spyware that folks expect. (if you have the knowhow, you can search through its sourcecode yourself, its free to download. but i think that if you have the know how, you might know what im talking about)

Pidgin takes many of the major Instant Messaging services (Aim, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN) and sticks them into a single program, with few, if any, errors. the program trillian does this as well. but, my preference, while not that of everyone, is for pidgin.

it also contains the ability to log every letter you ever sent or recieved using it. and there are many plugins that allow for decently secure messaging, and the like.

and also, FireFox/Thunderbird, or SeaMonkey allow for the unification of internet use, and electronic mail into a single client. additionally, the pidgin program has a web based cousin that works identically (in function, perhaps not appearence) to pidgin. what i find myself doing is that i currently have SeaMonkey set to capture both my school email, and my personal gmail and aol email accounts. i have SeaMonkeys web browsing interface set to automatically display both my facebook account, the pidgin programs web based cousin, "meebo", and also the news site "digg" and my schools homepage, at start up.

while those programs might not be as flashy as the very useful and business applicable programs // implementations mentioned above, i find that at the least they can fulfill the needs of the average jane/joe user. also, once a person gets more comfortable, they would be able to highly customize this suite using user submitted (and peer reviewed) modifications that can be added into the mozilla seamonkey browser with a pretty handy options menu.

but, if the startups do a particularly nice job in their flagship offerings, i may even switch.

Srini Srinivasan · 2 years ago

If you look at the core organizational metaphors behind eMail they are still based on folders or tags. For those suffering from communications overload adding a people-centric view of information is a good step. But the fundamental reason why people use social networks stems primarily from the need to express one's identity. Unless you can organize a person's life around their sense of identity in all its facets, you will not be able to leverage the benefits of social networking in the world of productivity workers. On the flip side, unless you provide a shared environment that has the privacy controls inherent in one's InBox, you will not find productivity workers even comfortable with social networking, let alone leveraging the power of group intelligence it can bring to organizing one's life.

Hamish MacDonald · 2 years ago

For me, the most useful next iteration of e-mail will not be something that integrates instant messaging or social networking -- both of which are non-essential Web hobby/time-killer/toy applications in my experience.

What I want is a new protocol for e-mail like correspondence that includes some kind of universally-accepted standard for eliminating unsolicited communication. Outlook's filtering has stopped working for me, even set to its most exclusive rating, rules don't ever run, and its proprietary message approval systems are no good to me because my main client is Mac-based, and many of my friends don't use Outlook.

So, no, I don't want MySpace in my in-box. I want usable e-mail, because the present system is becoming increasingly unusable because it's so vulnerable to abuse.

Jonathan Robin · 2 years ago

Consolidation of personal communications - although useful for those who have difficulty following through on threads - seems essentially beneficial for wiretappers, potential phishers, and hacking by data marketing.

IMHO

Kevin · 2 years ago

I gave Fuser a try about a week ago and I wasn't impressed. The interface was too barren and sparse and it didn't work well in Firefox (on my mac or my linux box). I'm going to give Orgoo a try today and see how that goes.

Russ @ bombay potatoes · 2 years ago

I'm not overly impressed with web mail offerings but the outlook addon looks really-really interesting.

Thanks for the summary and the pointer.

Tom Collins · 2 years ago

I received an invite to use Xobni beta and it really has transformed my work environment in general; no more holding clients on the phone while I wait for Outlook search to chug away finding emails or related contacts.

Yoni · 2 years ago

You forgot one - another great startup, attacking another side of e-mail, an e-mail enhancer. Once you start you cant stop - these guys thought about everything. www.slimail.com

perbear · 2 years ago

Good to see efforts in making the e-mail better, but as you have commented, hey I am happy with g-mail.

What I miss is the aggregation of contacts.

I have started a blog to see if we can together write the perfect business plan for contacts aggregation and unification, please let me know your opinions.

Per

Stephen Barnes · 2 years ago

See our one minute movie. The fact that you get an email is irrelevant. It's what you DO as a result of having received it that counts.

www.orla.org

thinkfeeldo · 2 years ago

Yawn....ho hum....they're all light years behind a project ya'll b hearin' bout in 08.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

http://tinyurl.com/2zx6qh

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