Here are just a handful of the reasons:
- It is deceptively hard. Like airfare pricing, most people think it's a couple weekends of work, when in fact it's at least 5 years and millions of lines of code to get to a real MVP that someone could use instead of Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc... The set of abstractions required to do it right are unobvious and nontrivial, and you end up with unfixable problems if you don't get them all right. We've rewritten Inky essentially from scratch twice, and only in the current version 3 (circa October 2015) do we finally have the abstractions correct. Look at the Thunderbird bugzilla logs and you will find thousands of bug entries, many of which go on for pages and pages. ITA was similar, by the way: 1996-2001 was basically iteration to get to an MVP.
And because it's not just hard, but deceptively hard, founders and their teams systematically underestimate the effort required, which leads to all kinds of failure modes. Even in the success stores like Mailbox, the teams basically punt on a number of hard problems that really are required for an MVP (like properly sanitizing HTML, supporting Exchange and IMAP "for real", proper support for all the weirdly encoded mail you see in the wild, encrypted mail via S/MIME, etc.)
- The other entities you have to work with are a complete nightmare, and as the client app everything appears to be your fault. Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc. just do whatever the hell they want, randomly, have broken servers they never fix, and place arbitrary problematic restrictions on clients: all limit clients to a small number of connections, and Apple won't let an email app run in the background, so you can't support "real" push notifications without keeping the user's credentials unencrypted in the cloud (which I refuse to do). Google, out of the blue, started banning clients that didn't use oAuth, sending users scary messages about unsafe software. oAuth is great, but just breaking everyone who doesn't support it yet is really, really nasty.
- VCs absolutely hate the space. Email startups have been dogs forever, and every name-brand VC has been burned on a crappy email investment.
- Consumers simply don't care about usability, privacy, or anything else enough to not use what comes with their phones.
- Security-conscious people who might pay for something that's genuinely secure never believe anything is genuinely secure in practice unless it's open source... in which case there is no business model.
- Existing mainstream clients are ironically sticky, because once users develop coping strategies to deal with the quirks of the client they're forced to use, they never want to invest the effort into learning the quirks of a new client.
So why do I work on it? Because in my opinion it's a really important problem that affects billions of people -- and one that needs to be solved properly by folks who are doing it not just as a data harvesting operation, loss-leader to sell devices, or as a way to build a moat around a core offering (search).
I would be very interested to hear more about this aspect, if you would be willing to share. I'm always curious about things that sound like they should be simple but end up being surprisingly complicated if you want do do a good job :)
If you haven't already seen it: http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-com...
On the contrary email in 2015 isn't a huge need or a pain point for most people.
Since you're entering a crowded market your product has to be 10X better. Currently it's probably not which is why most people perceive Inky as a marginal improvement.
Still I'd love to see other projects you're working on Dave. Clearly you're talented and with the right idea I could see you getting back to where ITA & Crash was.
Also, regarding Inky-- I just spent a few minutes browsing your site, and it didn't answer my first question: why should I switch to your product from gmail?
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.itasoftware.c...
Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards.
EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.
I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.
Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook.
And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do.
Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.
I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail.
So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.
Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company.
There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company.
Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).
"We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app"
Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
It's still a prominent, maybe even the most prominent, item on my personal list of "reasons I shouldn't build an email app."
I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.
We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year.
Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3]
What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service?
What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?
1. APIs for developers that replace IMAP/SMTP/Exchange. Use this to build any app that integrates with a user's mailbox, calendar, or address book.
2. A new extensible email app, built on web technologies (Chromium+NodeJS). This is called N1 and was released about 2 months ago.
We sell the APIs as an infrastructure business (like AWS).
I think certain enterprise-y email solutions have this, but there's no way to have that happen in the distributed email ecosystem unless all your messages were just links to a website that could delete the content centrally, or similarly, jpg's of rendered text that were somehow forced to be remotely fetched each time.
I know I had a former boss that loved to try using the outlook "unsend the stupid thing i sent" feature.
Little did he know the cients could turn that bit of functionality off. He hated when we replied to the emails he had "purged".
other than that, i don't think receivers like the idea that others can control what's in their inbox.
I went to the "releases" tab on GitHub and it looks like the last one was in 2014. I see things in the GitHub repo that suggest there are Dockerfiles and Debian packages, but I don't see an actual Debian package repository or an entry on the Docker Hub. Is the recommended way to use it today just cloning the git repo? Or is there a stable release of the sync server that's tested/known to work with the binaries of the client?
We don't have "releases" because we are constantly releasing to production. Check out the `production` branch on GitHub for what we're running right now. Usually it's just a handful of hours behind master (at most).
I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.
That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be worth $10M in 5 years. That's still a great return, but right now it's the domain of private equity.
- good for founders - they get a big fat paycheck and a chance for a job in a big company
- good for VCs - a payoff, even if small, is better than no payoff at all, so they want their 9 not-so-good startups to be bought
- good for the buying company - they can literally just kill the competition by throwing money at them, + they get some proven and experienced employees, which may be worth it given the unreliability of the standard hiring process
Care to guess who this deal is not good for?
Startups are (and are being heavily marketed as) a get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the people involved are self-selected to follow this process. And all this talk about providing value to the users? That's the part of the scheme where you get used.
And many times, there's no other exit option for the VCs. Does it suck for users? Absolutely - which is why companies often have lots of apprehension about being early adopters of a startup's technology. It's why B2B startups are really hard, and why they tend not to hockey-stick because the customer acquisition costs are high and don't shrink with scale.
It's up to the founders to convince their VCs to pass on the acquihire because they think the company still has hockey-stick potential. Zuckerberg did this a number of times - it was still really arrogant, but it paid off for Facebook and shows why founders need a bit of arrogance to be successful. It's a lot harder to do this if you're running a startup that doesn't have a lot of market traction.
Doesn't that make them bad though? I mean it's like saying "It's not that the mafia are bad people who want to screw over people, but their business model requires them to blackmail and occasionally kill" (not comparing levels of "badness" of course, merely showing the problem in said reasoning).
It's not like following a particular "business model" is not a decision people get to make. And if people take the VC model that favours acquihires, then they very much have decided to do stuff that screws with users.
You get acquihires when the assumptions behind the company's business model have been proven false and there's basically no way to solve it other than rebooting the company. Arguably this is an argument to not take VC until you've got the hockey-stick trajectory, so you can pivot & reboot at will without dissolving an existing organization. But even this sucks for customers, if you have any.
My view on acquihires is that to some extent it's a trick the acquiring company plays on itself. Some manager is getting to hire a few good people using money (the acquisitions budget) they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Also, there's generally some amount of IP and customer data involved as well.
For about 6 months to a year, after which time most of them have left, or have gone into "waiting for the golden handcuffs to come off" zombie-worker mode on a project they have no inherent interest in.
Totally anecdotal but the couple of acquihires I've seen from the inside have gone like this and it seems to be the natural state of them based on what I've heard second-hand from others.
Any acquisition involves a lot of turnover. Guaranteed that this turnover is built into the models they use when evaluating acquihires. Consider how expensive most company's talent acquisition costs are though (upwards of $100k+ per candidate hired for top talent) and it starts to make sense.
Dropbox could have thought that and just been wrong. Even in the normal economy, per The Economist about half of all acquisitions destroy value. In our little hothouse, I'd expect a much larger percentage of value-destroying takeovers.
But there are plenty of other reasons deals get done than a company-wide coherent calculation of economic value. E.g., I've heard of acquisitions happening because a CEO needs to demonstrate to the board that they're doing something. Or incentive structures set up to reward an M&A team based on how many deals they do. Or executives wanting to bring in their old buddies from another company. Or, "gosh, money is so cheap right now we'd better spend it because our competitors are spending."
The opportunity was the team, not the product they were producing.
Say you had a room full of math prodigies, but all they were doing was watching TV all day. You hire these math prodigies for $X and put them to work solving math problems - this doesn't mean that watching TV is worth $X, in fact it likely means the opposite, that their value is underutilized by whatever they're doing right now.
So there isn't enough money in making email apps, but a team capable of producing a great email app can be put to use doing things that do make a lot of money - but it sure isn't making email apps.
And that's unfortunate, because as users we're missing out on a lot of great products. The dark side of the immense growth in software (and immense growth in software salaries) is that entire products and services are no longer economical, even though we'd all love to see them. The VC system that drives these early acquisitions and acquihires is just one more factor among many that limit the field of what can be economically produced.
Too much money! I don't care how big of a genius you are you're not worth that as a developer of an email client, and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit. The UI was dope, and their invite process was funny, that's all.
Looks like Dropbox fucked up, that's all, bad business decision, trying to copy Google and do better than them in the end they did the same.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around...
Not exactly. Could be the other way round too. It depends on whether the stock of the company is worth more or less than cash in the long run.
Except since it is the company issuing stock in itself you can't really think of it as fungible. If it ends up being worth more than the strike price then literally one of the events that led to that price was the purchase stock being issued. Of course that doesn't mean the is a causal link, but in a very real sense the stock was free for the company itself.
The only cost to the company is opportunity cost.
Stock always has value, especially to management.
Unless the company has poor self-esteem. :)
The reason so many technology companies today make acquisitions using stock is because they (correctly) understand their stock to be inflated, relative to intrinsic value. If that were not the case, if they understood their stock to be undervalued, then they would definitely not be giving it away in transactions. They would be making all-cash offers instead.
But that's the key isn't it? I think you're looking at this from too narrow a point of view.
Yeah, email clients aren't worth much money, so its development isn't worth much either (when's the last time anyone you know paid for an email client?).
The point isn't to acquire a "developer of email clients" it's to acquire a "developer of top-of-class mobile apps", which is considerably valuable. Think of the average quality of a mobile app you use on your phone, the bar is pretty low. Producing truly amazing mobile apps (like you said, the UI was dope) is hard, and requires the flawless, cohesive operation of a lot of facets from engineering to UX design.
Truly excellent mobile teams are very rare, and worth a lot of money. To the tune of $7.6MM over 2 years? Beats me, but it doesn't seem completely out of the question.
Talented developers are worth a lot of money - teams of talented developers, designers, and product people who have a track record of producing stellar work together are worth a multiple of their individual values.
> " and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit."
It's not genius level shit, but it's a surprisingly rare skill, and by that I mean writing very, very good frontends. Most people here can write a functional email client if they had to, but how many of them can write a really fucking good one, so good and so easy to use that people - and not just the technorati - sing its praises from the rooftops and get their friends and family to download it?
The Mailbox team was operating at a level well above nearly all mobile app teams, and the quality of their work was easily an order of magnitude better than the industry norm of its time. This may not justify their acquisition price, but I think you're selling them short a bit. They're a team of people known for exceptional quality work, and command a high price for it.
If we're being ultimately generous with Dropbox then what they are doing is exactly correct - taking a team that can create a $100M+ product and reassigning them somewhere that they can fulfill that potential. But that's of scant consolation to all the people that want to continue using the email app.
Because if that's your goal, you clearly aren't passionate about what you're doing. You might as well go work for a 9-5 company doing CRUD apps. /s
If you think of your business as a castle, a moat is something that stops others from taking your castle from you. This could be anything from a network effect (Facebook, LinkedIn), economies of scale (Amazon, Walmart), to patents (most biotech companies) to brand (Coke).
The way he put it was something like, "If you gave me 100 billion dollars to take Coke's market, I can't. They've been investing in infrastructure and brand all over the world for decades. Even if I could make a better tasting beverage, people would still buy Coke. They have a moat".
http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/09/warren-buffett-on-economic-...
Though they are making good things, so it's hard to be too critical.
I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com
I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!
Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!
I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question.
There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer.
For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier?
So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero.
So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.
There's a fourth: they serve the needs of their customers over the course of years and decades. which, as someone in the market for an email client I can fall in love with and use for the rest of my life; is exactly what I want.
Why does every startup need to aim to take over the world overnight? Is it not feasible to first take external funding to grow quickly in early stages, and then transition to a more organic growth model once you reach a point of profitability and sustainability (and maybe also slowly buy back shares in the company to eventually become fully autonomous)?
Its preferable to work on a project for a few years instead of half/full decades.
Once you raise venture capital, you have to go big or go home, in the span of a decade. You don't have the "grow slow and stay private" option after raising a Series A.
That being said, this is just the current, common state in VC-backed companies. With the weak IPO market and hostile public environment that forces short-term quarterly thinking, we may see alternatives like formalized secondary markets. Perhaps companies like Uber will be able to avoid going public and still provide liquidity options for their early investors & employees.
> hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die.
No offense, but it doesn't really sound like you were kidding. I have no skin in this game because I never used Mailbox and am content to continue using GMail, but if I was upset about this shutdown and in the market for a new email client that would be around long-term, your answer wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. You've basically said you're going to shut down (or get acquired and then, inevitably shut down) unless you hit the lottery ticket of a billion dollar company.
Speaking more generally, I think this sort of attitude is going to catch up with VC-backed startups sooner or later. Why would I make my workflow depend on a startup that is, in all likelihood, going to either shut down or get acquired and shut down? For anything with a high switching cost, using a product from a VC-backed startup that has this outlook is just going to cause me problems later if I get dependent on it.
I think a lot of companies would do better by their customers (and themselves) if they instead looked for a more sustainable business model. But there isn't as much of a lottery ticket in those businesses, so I can see why some founders avoid it.
What's wrong with just having a nice business that just makes some money?
If you do snooze[1], I'll throw all my money at you :)
[1]: which of course either requires server side (e.g. Mailbox) or (preferably) client side logic. I'd be fine with the latter, but I agree it's a non-trivial problem.
Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)
When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?
That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening.
[0] - or Moloch.
――――――
I'd like Inbox-like features theoretically, but the fundamental UX/UI is done better than anyone else IMHO.
- Open Mail, roughly time how long it takes from left pane click to message fully rendered on the right (~2-3 seconds)
- Open Dropbox (fast before it goes away!) and do the same (~250ms)
I get roughly 100-150 emails overnight that I go through in the morning. At 2-3 seconds PER THREAD render this is insanely unproductive use of my time.
Every time I open OSX Mail I have this exact process in my head and I promptly close it.
I'm also talking about my iOS experience. There are some perf issues that would be nice, but for me that's mostly in search and initial sync than stuff that's already downloaded.
It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date.
"—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.
Was there a killer feature that I missed?
But since Inbox came out, I have seen no reason to open Mailbox, and I would say that Mailbox actually inspired Inbox.
I'm actually quite a fan of the gmail interface; it is one of the most usable webmail experiences in my opinion (I use google apps both at work and for personal use). For day-long usage, I'd rather stick with mutt/vim.
If you only apply only one label to a mail at a given time, it works as a folder would do just fine.
On iOS I'm pretty happy with Microsoft Outlook (can't believe I just said that), I haven't found anything better yet.
I do use multiple accounts extensively so that limits my choices to just those clients that support multiple accounts well (unified inbox, etc).
(Also feel free to write me directly. mg@nylas.com)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334154
Update: It looks like they have a public Trello board for voting on features. Go vote for snoozed emails!
Also the memory footprint was a little large but that's understandable since it's built on Chrome/Node. Web browsers and development related processes (mostly Ruby) are my top memory consumers right now, I'd rather not have my email client join their ranks.
For intra-corporate mail, email works just great, because the identity problem is solved. Trusted communications between 3rd parties just isn't a natural mail use case.
Not really. Hence the rise of intra-corporate chat software.
People instead prefer to join focused, well defined groups to send and receive intra-corporate communication.
Not bee CC'ed spammed all to h*ll about every little office detail that has zero impact on you and your job.
You need to consider what is more valuable, the ability to universally send arbitrary content to arbitrary end points without intermediaries .... Or no spam, and perfect security.
As I said, it's all about identity.
Spam, in the I'm getting random Viagra emails sense, is being handle very well lately.
That said... We have a very large industry that easily helps you get your "ham" (the mail in-between Spam and mail you really want to receive) inboxed.
This is email from legit companies. Maybe you signed up to a newsletter, maybe you didn't. Maybe you're just getting a cold email. But those emails are inboxed.
People are still complaining about being overwhelmed by their email, even though our Spam filters have improved greatly.
It's untenable to depend on developer tools that a company owns. I love free software, but in all honesty the reason I incorporate it is more selfish. My workstation is exclusively free software so I don't have to be abreast of business news to get my job done.
I've basically settled on my emacs + notmuch + offlineimap solution not because I think it's better than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years.
For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!
Do you have a config posted anywhere? I'd love to see exactly how hard it would be to switch.
Edit: Arch seems to suggest running mbsync under a global systemd unit - user units are more appropriate for this task - my units can be found here: https://github.com/rdark/systemd-user-units
Notably, I use the smtpmail-multi package along with smtpmail in emacs to support sending from whatever address I put in the To: line[0]
[0]: https://github.com/codemac/config/blob/master/emacs.d/boot.o...
Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.
(Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)
Last I checked, the gmail app only worked with gmail accounts.
Just curious, how is processing hundreds of emails in Mailbox or Inbox better than Outlook? Seems like trying to do that on a mobile device would be hard no matter what app.
Email should be simple but there has been essentially no lasting innovation in email clients in a very long time unless you really want Google to host it for you
Of course, to trust that feature, it also has to be tremendously reliable, and that's the biggest thing that Mailbox got right in the first place. That's also why it very handily beat out Mail Pilot, which had the same idea and got started earlier but to this day is still filled with terrible bugs.
Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.
My favorite tiny detail is that I can tune the notifications to push only unread counts to the icon badge and only for the "focused" inbox. That means I can avoid constant push notices for email yet still be able to glance down when I want to and see if I have any unread emails that are actual human communications.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/gmail-for-android-gets-a-un...
Instead I get downvoted. Gee, thanks. Since when has downvote come to mean disagree on HN?
Sure the build is 2+ years old, but the usability is just incredible. I haven't found anything better on desktop since.
I was a huge fan of Sparrow (like you, I used it long after the updates stopped), then Airmail and Mailbox, but now I simply use the Gmail web app. I follow the zero inbox method strictly, so I only need to read/archive/reply/search emails, and it does a decent job at it (except for search where it's best in class), while being simple and non-confusing.