Ask HN: Why haven't we seen a new email service?
I see email, SMTP, federated protocols, etc popup quite frequently on HackerNews. I think there's always this debate between self-hosting and allowing a third party to manage your inbox but I guess the question I have is, why haven't we seen a new amazing email provider as of yet?
Every few years we see messaging get reinvented and it becomes a huge thing, but not email. Everyone has an email address that's stuck somewhere and that's it, it's like no one ever moves. I'm using a custom domain with gmail and I've been happy with that for a long time but I always do wonder, why has no one challenged it?
Hey.com looks interesting but maybe too big of a move for my liking. I really like utility style email, that's why gmail was so nice in the beginning but also free with 1Gb storage was a plus. Superhuman is a closed prosumer thing too.
Where's the new consumer email experience? What's the top 3 must have features of that? I guess just randomly throwing this thought out into the universe because I'm genuinely curious.
10 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadYou've answered your own question: you're a happy, long-term customer of a free service.
A better question might be "What would it take for you to move from gmail to a paid service and how much are you willing to pay, or, how would you envision a free, sustainable email service?"
With email I guess there's a few angles to play. Personally I feel like email on the web has gotten slow but paying for something isn't the path to a better experience. The other part is that if email is so core to identity, why aren't services baked into that email client experience.
>maybe too big of a move for my liking
I think this is why. Most people are fine with the existing offerings, and anything that deviates from them is seen as too big of a move. So why bother?
The most viable reason to run email, is if you want to pull in corporate customers, but then you also need to do more than just email.
Where are you going to get funding to start an email service, given these market conditions?
You could maybe do a premium email client, but the market is going to be pretty small.
In Germany we had the "de-mail" which was supposed to be an official email service that's accepted by government offices as a legal means for better communication than fax machines. Now, a couple years later, most ISPs that offered this service, have given up on it and shut down the infrastructure for it.
I'd argue there's no value in providing email as a service (except for marketing and spamming), and that is the reason why everyone migrated to microsoft's O365 package because it integrates with other business processes nicely.
Maintaining your own email server is also ridiculously expensive. Not only the maintenance and unblocking overhead, but the legal compliance as well. You'll get government-issued requests for sharing customer data probably on an hourly basis.
Do you want to deal with that in order to keep it a legal business? Probably not.
There's also little room for innovation due to how email clients work, and how legacy tech has to be able to interact with each other...except maybe with (managed) GPG encryption for a secure communication pipeline, but then you need a good contact management system, which by definition will end up with basically the source of requests of the feds for the keys...and then you need to figure out how to encrypt user data with them inserting their keys at every login, so that it's actually only in encrypted form on your server.
And then you get a legal case that buries your resources for years like it happened with tutanota, which in the end forced them to send a copy of all incoming emails to the feds.
And then you just give up because email isn't worth it.