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Comment by mpclark | Hacker News Reader

Surely corporate IT departments are going to have a collective heart attack as employees start handing all their email to a third party?

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Additional madness when the services inevitably closes and tens of thousands of corporate tickets are files about non-working email clients.

Why would the service close? It's supported by LinkedIn and AFAIK they're not in the habit of shutting things down. This almost feels like a no-brainer for them, especially given the move to mobile devices and locked-down apps.

Edit: Have I missed the point? I'm sure LinkedIn is a little more cautious about such changes than your average newly-founded startup. This product gives them access to people emails which they can probably glean a lot of info from. They already try to get access into email accounts (username + password) via the LinkedIn webapp so in a way this is just extending that to mobile. The only reason I can imagine them shutting it down is if no-one uses it (in which case, no one will complain).

"It's supported by LinkedIn and AFAIK they're not in the habit of shutting things down"

You mean besides job agents, Answers, Events, ...

Fair enough but as I tried (and obviously failed) to caveat, these are not shutdowns I really knew about. I clearly wasn't a user of those products so I didn't feel any pain when they went away.

Perhaps my claim is weak and my knowledge limited but I find it more ridiculous to claim the inevitability of a closure before a product is even being used.

NB I feel I should add that I'm not going to be a user of this product as I won't hand over email access. However, I can imagine many people who don't think the same finding it very useful.

Think of it like a value proposition. Is the (dubious IMO) convenience of having Linkedin profiles in your email worth the cost of Linkedin having the content of your email? Even if they pinky-swear to never read it, don't forget that this proxy email server would be, overnight, one of the most valuable corporate espionage targets in the world.

(If yes, you should probably ditch reading email and do something more productive with your time, like picking up cans.)

That's not the point I was responding to. It was the claim that this service will inevitably close that I was disagreeing with.

Apologies, I was so gobsmacked by the security implications that I found it hard to focus on anything else!

Since this only works with Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud, the email is already with a third party.

That is an interesting note, but if the business is using Gmail (http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.html) maybe that's because they trust Google's services. Trusting one third party doesn't imply that you trust all third parties.

Agreed.

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