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by novum 4357 days ago
I have mixed feelings here.

On the one hand, the announcement is correct that "email is here to stay" and it's exciting to see innovation on top of an ancient protocol that was never intended for the abuse it receives today (IMAP).

On the other hand, the announcement is correct that "email is here to stay" and because my entire life runs out of my inbox, I am almost certain to never grant an arbitrary third party like Inbox access to my mail. How does Inbox make money? And Inbox fully intends to store my mail; why should I trust them?

On the other other hand, I have been a long-time happy customer of Fastmail.fm and I am both amused and disappointed to see that Inbox does not support an arbitrary IMAP connection (e.g. to support Fastmail).

1 comments

Michael from Inbox here. First of all, we love Fastmail and think they're great. :)

We're working hard to support any IMAP server, and it's our goal to support all providers. We just started with Gmail/Yahoo because they were the two largest services and made testing easier. IMAP is a tricky protocol to get right, with many various extensions that are not always supported or enabled.

We know we need to work to gain the trust of developers, and show that this is a product and company built by developers for developers. It's one of the reasons we decided to make the sync engine open source. Something that traditional "business school" folks would never do. We're going to keep making Inbox better and better, but the code will always be available for you to run yourself.

We're planning to release a hosted SaaS version of Inbox (think Heroku), so you don't need to host +terabytes of email data or manage sync infrastructure. We haven't announced details around that yet, but feel free to email me if you'd like access to the preview. mg@inboxapp.com