Ask HN: Why haven't we seen a new email service?

> I'm using a custom domain with gmail and I've been happy with that for a long time but I always do wonder, why has no one challenged it?

You've answered your own question: you're a happy, long-term customer of a free service.

A better question might be "What would it take for you to move from gmail to a paid service and how much are you willing to pay, or, how would you envision a free, sustainable email service?"

It's an interesting thought experiment. The move between messaging apps was always free to free and there was some specific niche innovation there, some twist of the mode of experience, whether it's moving from text to images or video or just a far more seamless experience, privacy, etc. There was some hook.

With email I guess there's a few angles to play. Personally I feel like email on the web has gotten slow but paying for something isn't the path to a better experience. The other part is that if email is so core to identity, why aren't services baked into that email client experience.

People don't want email, they want a set of office products.

In Germany we had the "de-mail" which was supposed to be an official email service that's accepted by government offices as a legal means for better communication than fax machines. Now, a couple years later, most ISPs that offered this service, have given up on it and shut down the infrastructure for it.

I'd argue there's no value in providing email as a service (except for marketing and spamming), and that is the reason why everyone migrated to microsoft's O365 package because it integrates with other business processes nicely.

Maintaining your own email server is also ridiculously expensive. Not only the maintenance and unblocking overhead, but the legal compliance as well. You'll get government-issued requests for sharing customer data probably on an hourly basis.

Do you want to deal with that in order to keep it a legal business? Probably not.

There's also little room for innovation due to how email clients work, and how legacy tech has to be able to interact with each other...except maybe with (managed) GPG encryption for a secure communication pipeline, but then you need a good contact management system, which by definition will end up with basically the source of requests of the feds for the keys...and then you need to figure out how to encrypt user data with them inserting their keys at every login, so that it's actually only in encrypted form on your server.

And then you get a legal case that buries your resources for years like it happened with tutanota, which in the end forced them to send a copy of all incoming emails to the feds.

And then you just give up because email isn't worth it.

The days of major distributed protocols like email is pretty much over. Once research orgs were replaced by corporations as the main force of Innovation, everything became a race to establish the next monopoly. If email was invented by, say, Google today it would be available through half a dozen of mediocre products with little to no industry support.

>I've been happy with that for a long time

>maybe too big of a move for my liking

I think this is why. Most people are fine with the existing offerings, and anything that deviates from them is seen as too big of a move. So why bother?

The market for email is established, with little growth (maybe negative growth). The market price is free / included. Ads don't pay enough for the hassle, unless you run the ad network.

The most viable reason to run email, is if you want to pull in corporate customers, but then you also need to do more than just email.

Where are you going to get funding to start an email service, given these market conditions?

Looking at existing email APIs, you don't really have to run the server anymore so that's a big plus, just do storage if you really want. Sendgrid and the like with relay mail for you. Superhuman focused on the client and builds on gmail, but I think you could actually start a new email provider on the back of sengrid and others.

Paying Sendgrid to send user mail isn't going to help the economics.

You could maybe do a premium email client, but the market is going to be pretty small.

Given all the drawbacks of email and how successful Discord, Slack and WhatsApp have been, I'd be surprised if there is any further major push into email. Why bother when the current market has shown what it prefers?

Hey.com is new (1.5-2 years?) - has an opinionated view of email clients and workflows. I'll leave it to the reader/public to decide if it fits the "amazing" qualitative measure.