Maascamp

The people submitting and upvoting stories like this are just as responsible for the shoddy state of tech journalism as these bloggers are.

Admittedly I'm referencing data I read somewhere which I can't find right now, so I'll retract the statement about SkyDrive being the biggest. It is certainly up there though and growing according to this financial report.

It's great to see this information going public, however hyperbolic statements like the above are completely unnecessary and really take away from the rest of the article.

The switching cost is simply too high and the only people outside of the tech world using Linux are generally those with old computers who had a techy friend install it for them. Problem is they'll be back to Windows as soon as they upgrade that old computer (or in my mom's case, as soon as the first thing doesn't work like it does on Windows).

People use templates in successful projects all the time. Don't generalize. I'm sure a lot of sites have found success in their niche using themeforest as well.

Thanks for asking. Feel free to contact me any time (gordon AT lightermail DOT com) with questions or suggestions!

We don't ask for your Gmail credentials though. We connect via OAuth. You can revoke our access at any time from your Google account without waiting for us.

This is a timely article for me though. We actually did a Show HN earlier today for a product (lightermail.com) whose ideal use is exactly this scenario. It allows people to control the flow of email from specific senders or domains. We see it being ideal for companies who have these sort of mailing lists, because it allows employees to subscribe to all the relevant lists without getting distracted by all the associated email throughout the day.

Good luck with your experiment! It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Lightermail allows you control when and from whom you receive email (from the global level to individual TLDs to specific senders). The who and when are highly configurable. You can also combine your unimportant email into summaries to reduce the actual quantity of email that lands in your inbox.

There's more of course, but that's the gist.

For those interested in the tech stack, the application's built with Backbone.js, Python, Redis, and Postgres. We use both tornado and gevent on the backend (with tornado being my personal favourite) and we're using Jekyll for the blog. If you want to get a little deeper just ask!

While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple to use. This adds a layer of complexity to the people trying to communicate with you that I think would just lead to fewer people attempting to communicate with you (which could in fact be what you want).

I've spent some time building my own "frighteningly ambitious" solution (I'm actually planing on doing a Show HN on Monday or Tuesday). Essentially, the idea is that right now it's the people emailing you that control your inbox. Our solution is to give users control over when and from whom they receive email. It puts you in actual control over you inbox for the first time. For those interested check out https://lightermail.com. Would love to get your opinion.

A great introduction to Mercurial for people familiar with SVN can be found here http://hginit.com/. Mercurial also has Tortoise HG (http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/) if you want a GUI interface.