raindrift

I based my estimates on the best numbers I could find. That said, my spam numbers were in fact incorrect (spam is small and gets deleted). Accounting for that, people save an average of a year's worth of email.

If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.

These are both excellent points. I've done a bit more digging, and updated the article to reflect them. Thanks!

Hi. This is Ian, Threadable cofounder. Thanks for your questions!

We're sustaining Threadable by charging business users for business-specific features. Those features will actually be rolling out soon, and have to do with internal access control and integration with certain external services. We don't talk about that stuff on the site yet because it's still in beta, but expect to see it soon.

I definitely see Facebook groups growing in popularity, but we're a long way from getting rid of email. I think the reason Facebook Groups has been able to gain so much ground is because email-based products haven't really changed in a long time, and Facebook Groups provides a much better user experience. However, email is still the only place you can be sure to find everyone, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon, especially in business. Group communication products have a bunch of tiny network effects, one per group, and they succeed or fail on how well they can reach every team member.

I'm an early beta user, and have been really happy with it. It saves me a bunch of time, but I think the real value is in what it teaches me about where to focus our efforts. Way easier to predict which initiatives (features, hires, etc) are going to make us money, and when we'd see returns.

Good question! At the moment, getting at your archives is about as easy as with Google Groups (which is to say, not very). Right now, you could use our webhooks to funnel all email into an archiver, so you have it. That's not a good solution for most people, though.

Going forward, we're very committed to data portability. Your data is yours. We want to keep your business by regularly delighting you, rather than controlling your content. The plan is to make it possible to export your list in a couple formats, probably JSON and mbox to start. This is down the roadmap a bit, probably June or so. However, if anyone needs their archive in the meantime, they can contact me and I'll make it happen.

In the slightly longer term, I want to build a feature that automatically syncs your list archive to your dropbox, so you can search it using tools like spotlight, and easily read it offline.

I agree completely! We're really excited about email transparency. Supporting it well has been one of our goals from the beginning. We have a few users who practice it (including us!) with whom we're working very closely to make sure we meet their needs.

For that matter, if anyone reading this is working with an organization that implements this philosophy, I would love to talk to you!

We exist, but we're still figuring out pricing. ;)

As I said earlier, our plan is to charge for business features, and not by restricting the number of users in a given list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429550

Thanks glasser!

One of the key changes between how Threadable works and previous mailing lists is that we can actually customize fairly deeply each message to each user, rather than simply reflecting the same thing out to the whole list. This trickles out into a bunch of interesting use cases and features, which we've only just started to implement.

Hey mbesto, our API is really early right now, but we'd love to work with you to make this happen. You can find my email in my profile, I'd love to discuss how you'd like to make this work.

There's a number of reasons, but our groups implementation is the most compelling one for me:

A threadable list can be divided easily into subgroups with their own subset of the list membership. Any member can create a group, and you can move threads between groups, even after they start.

In practice, this means you don't have to anticipate which groups to create in advance. You can just let discussion happen, and when critical mass around some topic is reached, move it off into a group without the overhead or interruption that comes from making a whole new mailing list.

This leads to more organic discussion, and also makes it possible for group members to help one another determine relevance. It's sorta like crowdsourcing your mail filters from the rest of your team. We've noticed that people are less likely to filter a Threadable list into another folder, so they participate more.

It's also more friendly to newbies, since there's less worry that a thread will end up in the wrong place. If it does, you can just move it.

I agree, email is sort of a morass of old, incompatible clients and aging protocols. They need work, but the installed base is huge, so it's a hard problem. The solution is probably to build a layer on top of all that to simplify it, much like jQuery did with incompatible DOM implementations.

So far, a number of companies are doing well with abstracting the protocol layer away to make focusing on building good apps easier (see mailgun.com for SMTP, context.io for IMAP, etc).

As to Threadable's long-term strategy, it goes further. :) Right now, we're building a great mailing list. As it gets further along, we plan to make it into a platform so that other app developers can use us to do all the difficult parts of managing threaded discussions, client compatibility, etc. The idea is to turn every app and website's isolated comment stream into a threaded email discussion, so people can engage using the tools they're already used to.

There's already millions upon millions of mailing lists out there, but nobody's made major changes in this space in a decade or more. We think we can add enough value that people will be happy to pay for it, and make group email collaboration more popular at the same time.

Our overall goal is the engagement and inclusivity that comes from making key information available in the way that people expect. Team collaboration tools only work well when the whole team uses them. The mailing list is just the best way to get there.

Heh. Threadable's actually Rails on the backend, but last time I had a problem with collectstatic being slow, I used this: https://github.com/antonagestam/collectfast

Our current thought is to charge for business features. A Threadable list is a pretty open place by default. Lists are all members-only, but once you've been added you have a lot of control. Private (within the team) subgroups are a feature we'll likely charge for, along with Google Apps integration. We've also seen a lot of interest in a product that can be installed behind a firewall, but that's a little further off.

One thing we know for sure is that we won't charge based on the number of users in your organization. We really value people being able to use Threadable for large-scale organizing outside of the business context, and we don't want our pricing model to limit that.

Thanks, neilk. People say they hate email, but we see that as an indicator of its utility: "I hate this but use it everyday" sounds like an opportunity for improvement. As Elie Wiesel said, "the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."

Hi, everyone. I'm Ian, one of the Threadable founders. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Yep! The Chrome debugger for js, and pry-debugger for ruby.