Comment by slurgfest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slurgfest | Hacker News Reader

This is intended to be constructive criticism, though you may find it harsh.

A quick look at the front page (particularly the stuff focused at the very top) does not suggest anything so much as a competitor to Gmail. Scroll down and the feature list does little to change this impression. For $20/user/mo? All right, you don't have the resources to compete with Google... I understand... but how does that change my decision as a potential customer?

Maybe it would help to emphasize a little more on what the distinctive advantage is here. Is the point just to get out from under Google et al. with a similar product? If so, maybe find some way to invoke the problem you see with Google et al. I don't know what you MEAN by "innovation from the inside out" or why it matters to me enough to pay $20/user/mo (for the preview; it looks like you plan to increase the price later...)

Phrases like "shit work" and "dick around" and "sticky fingers" on the questions page might be phrased more professionally, and several pages could use punctuation work (you seem to omit periods a lot)...

I am a little concerned about a "custom mail engine I'm writing from scratch". Are there not any established tools to build on in the Ruby world? Why do I want an email service which does not support IMAP or Android? Is this primarily geared at Apple devices or what (if so, that could be signaled more clearly...)

Good luck

>> This is intended to be constructive criticism, though you may find it harsh.

Any criticism is good right about now

It's very much a competitor to GMail, in that it's essentially GMail with some filtering and IMAP magic on top

To start with, my problem that I am attempting to solve is notifications for things I'm not interested in in the middle of the day, which I have attempted to solve with notifications + funnel

The distinctive advantage is the ability to modify when email is sent to you, plus the ability to filter different types of email (transactional, newsletter, human beings)

You're right on the unprofessional copy, I'm sorry, and the punctuation mistakes are simply a flaw in my English (It is my first language, there is no excuse)

I spent 3 months on the backend making sure it receives email perfectly, and securely, and I could not find a mail server written in Ruby which I could modify and add features like Funnel to

It supports IMAP, IMAP is the primary method which devices will retrieve email with (ActiveSync is patented by Microsoft, who would like licensing fees)

It will also support Android, as in, the native mail app on Android, I am just prioritising iOS first because it avoids competition with native GMail, which as one person, is nigh on impossible

Yes, it's primarily geared towards iOS devices for now, because I don't think I can compete with the GMail + Android paring yet

Thank you very much for the criticism, I'll do some changes now

EDIT: changes are live, viva la full stop.

> I spent 3 months on the backend making sure it receives email perfectly, and securely, and I could not find a mail server written in Ruby which I could modify and add features like Funnel to

The Sup mail client[1] went through a phase trying to handle IMAP directly, but the consensus was that it was simply too awful. It did yield some colorful code[2], but the fallout was that most people relied on offlineimap[3] to get their mail successfully.

[1] http://sup.rubyforge.org/

[2] http://sup.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/lib/sup/imap.rb

[3] http://offlineimap.org/

Thank you for the links, I'll look into Sup

SMTP was a piece of cake (apart from a weird SSL bug, which took up the majority of my time), but IMAP does look significantly trickier from the RFC

I would love to be in a place where IMAP isn't needed, and I plan to use my own API's for the client applications

Thank you for the code, in any case, it looks like a good laugh to read :D

$20 per month, per user seems a little high when compared to Gmail which is either free (personal) or $5/month (business). The fact that Google is able to charge for email is partially due to the fact that they offered it for free for so long and got so many people to like the experience that it created a lot of demand in the workplace for it - I think you really need a way to let people experience your application for free if you want any shot at enticing people to pay $20/month for it.

There may be some subset of people willing to pay $20/month for ultra-configurable filtering, but I'm not really sure how big that market is, and I doubt it will help you break into larger organizations.

OK, Thank you for the feedback, I'll rework the pricing structure soon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com