Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.) ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP.Īnd because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right.
Dropbox for mac mail code#
Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc. The VC-backed "winners" will all get aqui-hired, and then the acquirers will be unhappy because what they bought wasn't actually good enough for prime time. I simply don't believe it's doable for a normal startup (i.e., one without a crazy rich guy plowing money into it until it's good enough). If you're thinking about putting effort (or money) behind an email startup, think again. ( ) The challenges outlined in this thread are all accurate.
Dropbox for mac mail software#
I co-founded ITA Software and have been using some of the proceeds from the sale to Google to fund an email startup.
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