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Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

If you offered a license for web hosts to use this, I think I know a whole bunch of coders and designers who would gladly pay for a hackable IMAP client. Kickstarter isn't a bad idea, but you should also try polling people to find out if you could set up SaaS at the same time or some other scheme. There are many possibilities...

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The program is structured in a way that you can use it both as a hosted webmail AND as a locally running client. I needed that so i can use the web version from my iphone and sync my laptops for offline use.

But for web hosts i think they would prefer a solution for multiple users. This is designed for one person with multiple email accounts, so they would need to start the webgui program multiple times to host multiple users.

As for SaaS i'd rather have the users host their own version on Heroku or EC2 than having to manage all those clients.

Sorry, I realized after posting that my phrasing was pretty bad. The current setup looks good for the sort of thing I do– I would pay for it (one time probably)– but if you then made it super easy to set up for multiple users, even if it was a simple shell script or some kind of interface, you could do some sort of tool-subscription (pay once or subscribe for updates). By webhosts I was thinking primarily of people like me who manage a couple servers and do everything server-side for our clients except plug in the fiber...

Check out Roundcube if you are looking for an awesome webmail client.

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