Why email startups fail

Long article, but the fundamental premise is that IMAP, SMTP, and POP are all you need. And that email clients are good... This is just false IMHO. There is a reason why both Fastmail and Gmail implement their own protocols in addition to those.

But fundamentally the "folder" view of email does not work. A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously. And when the thread is spread across many folders, there needs to be a way to see the whole thread.

The only way to accomplish this is with email tags or labels. These are implemented by nearly all successful email companies. Gmail, Fastmail, and Proton are examples. Labels are a fundamental feature in this day and age, and neither IMAP nor POP can handle them gracefully.

Gmail is so big that when Outlook, Apple Mail, and even Thunderbird connect to it, they do an OAuth exchange and then talk over a proprietary protocol.

JMAP may have poor adoption, but it's the only open protocol that understands labels well. The lack of adoption is mostly due to email providers not implementing it. There is not a lot of incentive for clients to implement it for the few providers. And providers would prefer you use their web clients anyway, as then they control access to your email.

> Gmail is so big that when Outlook, Apple Mail, and even Thunderbird connect to it, they do an OAuth exchange and then talk over a proprietary protocol.

Can you elaborate? Anything I can read on this?

> A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously.

Citation needed. This has never occurred to me.

> And when the thread is spread across many folders, there needs to be a way to see the whole thread.

Already possible, at least in Thunderbird.

> Labels are a fundamental feature [...] and neither IMAP nor POP can handle them gracefully.

IMAP has user-defined labels, whats wrong with them?

An underrated feature of IMAP is that you can attach notes to mails.

>A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously

Just No. This is by far my biggest complaint of using Gmail.

It makes it impossible to write rules to file mail into folders as all you can do is add tags (labels). Whereas to _move_ you require the ability to unset and label which tags/labels don't support as thats a definining function of a folder.

Make Email Great Again! Now thats a campaign i'd be willing to fund!

This again is a limitation of mapping labels to IMAP, which does not understand labels.

Both the Gmail web interface and the Gmail API allow the ability to set all the labels for a message. This can effectively enable your desired functionality. But IMAP can only deal with "folders", and cannot correctly decide when to remove a single label or remove all other labels when it sees a move action.

IMAP also only deals in messages and not threads. Gmail labels also technically only apply to messages, but the web interface shows the union of all labels of a thread. This is another decision I agree with. It means that when someone explicitly adds me to a thread, the whole thread gets highlighted in my feed.

I personally really enjoy the Gmail/fastmail/proton behavior so please don't make another political campaign to make things worse again. We have enough of those.