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Comment by hidelooktropic | Hacker News Reader

"We only support Gmail and Gsuite email accounts today"

Nice work here but here's where innovation could start with another smart email client in the crowded market. It seems they are all "gmail now and outlook on the roadmap" I know these are common email suites but why not friendly and open protocols like Fastmail's JMAP?

Gmail is also precisely the product that needs this extra functionality the least.

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It’s a lot harder to figure out if you have product market fit when you’re choosing a starting point that significantly reduces your addressable market.

Do GMail and Outlook (and Exchange?) support JMAP?

I'm all for open standards, but as a sibling put it, when you're starting out, you may not want to limit your market size, unless you know you're addressing some kind of niche to begin with.

Most apps target Gmail because most users use Gmail.

Supporting other email providers would be nice to have. It's open source so maybe someone else will contribute support for other emails before I get to it. It's not the first item on my roadmap. I'd like to perfect the current user experience.

Do you know what % of users use GMail vs Outlook? I am genuinely curious as I am also targeting GMail users to start with based on a hunch.

I don't know. But easily 50%+ of people I've spoken to / surveyed use Gmail.

Tbh it would make more sense for other providers like Fastmail to provide a Gmail-compatible API since that seems to be the defacto standard. They could open source the Gmail to JMAP translation layer if they want to improve interoperability.

my brother used to say it's stupid to use firefox, internet explorer is the defacto standard

He was just early: FF market share is 3% and dropping. It's all about UX

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