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Comment by vikingcaffiene | Hacker News Reader

Every single one of these tools only connect to Gmail. It's kind of a bummer.

Gmail has 2.0 Billion users right now. Anything that's successful is going to build an Outlook integration. The reason they aren't launching with Outlook integrations is because it's hard to launch as an enterprise product without any validation for the core value prop; otherwise you'd be spending years building permission management features without knowing whether the actual core product is even useful in the first place.

I'd imagine the OP wasn't expressing frustration about not having Outlook integration along with Gmail integration. But instead that it doesn't work with the email protocol, thus working with any standards compliant servers.

> But instead that it doesn't work with the email protocol, thus working with any standards compliant servers.

That isn't really a thing though. The email protocols cover the format of the message and how it's transmitted, there isn't any standard for how servers are implemented that would allow one to develop email software that automatically works with any server. Otherwise Nylas wouldn't be a thing.

That is simply not true. For Client-Server communication there is IMAP (for management of your mailbox) and SMTP (for sending emails) which is also used for Server-Server communication.

The fact that clients such as Thunderbird (or mutt) exist and work with basically all email hosts is a testament to this fact.

IMAP exists.

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