With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

I watched and waited with anticipation for the launch, and was excited when I got my invite and could start using the service.

It's a great product, with excellent UX and design, and while it still felt technically like a work in progress, I was ready to stick it out as a user and see where everything went.

Now, less than two months after getting my "golden ticket," it's all going away with a vague statement: "We feel that we couldn’t keep running the service as it is, and now’s the time to move on."

Was there not enough runway to survive beyond six months? Did something else happen that they don't feel like discussing? If you're going to make announcements like "The future of email, brought to you by ex-Google people," it seems like you should at least know that you've got the funding to keep the lights on for more than a couple months.

It might seem like I'm being harsh on Fluent, considering that I'm just a user who didn't pay anything and shouldn't have any expectations. I'm not thinking about this as a user, though. I'm thinking about this as a would-be startup entrepreneur. One of the biggest barriers to getting traction early on is convincing users that you're going to stick around, that they can invest their time getting used to your product, even trust their data with you. After all, you're just some startup, maybe they should wait a year and see if you're still there. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a Catch 22, because you need those early adopters in order to still be there in a year.

When a startup makes big claims, then closes their doors mere months later, it puts another brick in the wall that makes it harder for other startups to make the case that it's worth getting on board for early adopters.

I'm sad to see Fluent go. It was a good idea, and seemed to be well executed. I just wish they'd be a bit more transparent about what happened, and why they weren't able to see this coming.

Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best things on the internet ever.

The primary problem with these services is that they have to pull content and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every 2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them making it less processing intensive (push based systems).

There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle caps at about 35K connections per box.

You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.

We calculated that it cost us about 2 euros per month to support a free user providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".

Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to extend things that way?

I would like to see someone else take this idea and run with it because I think it's definitely something that is bound to happen, someone at some stage will make email better. I think the owners should open source the code on Github, it would be a shame for such a service to fall by the wayside all because the funding wasn't there.

This post read a little bit like "This is more expensive to run in time and money than we thought - so we're shelving it for now."

Can I ask - was this move triggered by (a) Google buying Sparrow? (and thus shelving other email acquisition plans) (b) Marissa Mayer moving to Yahoo (and killing a potential purchaser strategy) (c) The release of outlook.com (creating a high speed competitor with lots of resources for distribution and support and marketing).

I did, and found it wasn't quite for me. The interface left too much detail out, and I preferred GMail + Rapportive to do my emails.

Was there a mobile app that was better? I only used the web app.

1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything modern.

1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo. Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell username, and the system sends email with one return email address when the message is original with me, but when I'm replying to an email sent by someone else, the return email address is different. Both email addresses go to my account, but my friends have often been confused about which my "real" email account is. And so have I. All the same, to this day, I still use this account in emergencies, when other email technologies have failed me. I hate, hate, hate the fact that so much of my "Sent" history is locked inside of this system.

1998 - an intense period of experimentation during which I tried 8 different email clients, many from very small 3rd parties, some of which only had a single developer, but some of which were famous among that crowd of tech elite who had been on the internet since the 1980s. All of these clients were later abandoned by their developers, or the company that owned the software went backrupt. There was one exception: Outlook Express.

1997-2000 - used Outlook Express. Downside was simply that it ran on Windows, and I was never happy being on Windows. Also, when I was ready to move to something else, I could not find any easy way to mass export my email, nor save it in some format other than eml.

2001-2007 the year before I had started renting my own server and keeping my email on my own server. In 2001 I switched to Linux as my main computer. After some experimentation, I settled down to using Thunderbird. My problem was that this client was incredibly buggy. At least on my Red Hat machine, and later on my Ubuntu machine, Thunderbird had many, many bugs and would often crash, causing me to lose a lot of work. Frustrated with Thunderbird, I would sometimes switch back to using my Geocities account, which I sort of hated, but which was more reliable.

2007-2009 - used Gmail, but hated having to rely on a 3rd party, and have also had privacy concerns with Google. Since 2000 I have preferred to rent my own server and keep my email on my own machine.

2010-2011 - used Pine. Also experimented with using Emacs as my main email client. I love Emacs, but decided I did not like it for email.

2011 - by 2010 I had sort of given up on Linux and switched to using a Mac as my main machine. Sometimes use the Mail.app for particular purposes, such as subscribing to various newsgroups. In general afraid of vendor lock-in and would prefer an open source solution. Mostly used Thunderbird. It is much less buggy than what I had to deal with years earlier on Linux. But still, it is somewhat buggy (sometimes search will stall, sometimes windows become non-responsive, and HTML quoting does not work well, which drives me crazy). It lacks some features that clients in the late 90s had, with the one big exception that it supports HTML email. However, I prefer to use plain text email, so that feature means nothing to me. When I try to use the HTML email, I run into numerous flaws that strike me as bugs: invisible barriers that will sometimes not allow the cursor to move up or down, when I'm using the arrow keys, or sections that won't allow themselves to be selected, or sections that can only be selected as a block. Drives me crazy.

It is 2012. I am unhappy with my email client. I would like something better, preferably open source.