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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

You say that like Gmail is the market leader here, they're not. Most of the features you mentioned do exist in other services and other services do have features that Gmail doesn't. The OP can definitely make a business out of email, it is far from a solved problem.

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> You say that like Gmail is the market leader here, they're not.

They are as far as I'm concerned. I'm curious, though, who you do consider to be the market leader? I'm going to have a hard time keeping my composure if you say Hotmail (or "Live" mail), Yahoo, or something similar.

Is market leader defined in terms of quality/features? Or number of users?

Market leader would mean number of users most likely. Otherwise it's an opinion on which is a better email client and service.

when i looked for a replacement for gmail, http://www.runbox.com seemed best, but that was a couple of years ago (instead i use procmail, mutt and mairix, but i imagine that's not for everyone...)

huh. has hn always inlined links? maybe i have never added the http: prefix before...?

Gmail may be a leader in the US, but Hotmail does have a much larger market penetration in Asian countries. And in the UK, form what I recall.

In terms of users they obviously are the market leader. I use Outlook.com personally and consider it to be overall better than Gmail. I'd gladly debate this if you'd like.

Never the less, my original point was that all of these Gmail strengths that you think are very important are obviously not very important to people using Yahoo or their ISP webmail. The idea that everyone uses Gmail and any competitor must compete feature-by-feature is just incorrect.

This sounds an awful lot like telling your customers they're wrong. And if you find yourself doing that, it's usually because you don't understand what your customer wants.

"obviously are the market leader"

Gmail only just recently (October 2012) overtook Hotmail.

Typo on my part, meant to say that Gmail isn't the market leader in terms of users, Yahoo is.

Spot on. The app currently is quite egocentric, how I would like to read/organize my mails. If there is a small niche, who'd like to work the same way AND pay for it, I'd seriously consider making a business out of it.

The great thing is, to respond to the initial comment: It's build on top of MailGun, so all the nitty gritty "details" are already solved. It's a great service, really.

Email is not a solved problem? How do I use it daily without thinking about it. Solved in my mind.

That's what they said about horses. Then along came Henry Ford.

No "they" didn't, nobody ever said that horses were the ultimate form of transportation, and long before Ford came along the Railways were already whisking people along in greater safety and speed than horses.

I want to add to this, people actually hated horses with a passion, especially in cities. They were a transportation necessity, you couldn't move heavy goods without them ... but they would defecate absolutely everywhere and most cities weren't terribly organized in terms of cleaning up the poop. Which means they reeked of horseshit constantly. As noisy and polluting as cars were, people considered them a godsend.

Building email clients are big gnarly tasks...more on that in the am...

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