MIT and dropbox alums have launched a new startup called
Inbox, it hopes to be the next generation of e-mail platform. It is similar to
the recently released Gmail API. Inbox facilitates users to build apps in a
more modern way, these apps can then access user’s inboxes. Gmail API is only
limited to Gmail but Inbox can be used to with Microsoft exchange, Yahoo and
several others.
Inbox offers a wide range of features that can be used by
those who wish to create complete email clients with lots of features, to those
who want simple features.
Inbox was founded by MIT alums Christine Spang, who worked
at Ksplice as a Linux kernel engineer, and Michael Grinich, who worked as an
engineer at designer nest and Dropbox. The team of Inbox includes several MIT
alums, two graduates from Distributed Operating Systems group and Parallel at
MIT CSAIL. It also has people with experience from Firebase and Google.
Michael Grinich remarked that he wrote his thesis on email
tools, and he found out how difficult it was for developers to add features to
their email clients. The main issue he found was the underlying work required –
Character encoding, MIME, IMAP etc. This is the issue Inbox fixes. But the main
goal of Inbox is not just to provide a set of developer tools for email
clients, it plans to set a new e-mail standard.
Inbox is currently offering an open source sync engine for
free that works with Yahoo mail and Gmail, but they plan to expand to all other
IMAP providers. Microsoft Exchange enterprise users can also request access to
the developer program of Inbox that supports ActiveSync.
Inbox is based in San Francisco and is backed by SV angel,
Fuel Capital, CrunchFund, Betaworks, Data Collective, and others. Details about
funding have not been disclosed.
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