Laserlike

With the technical feats accomplished by the new Yahoo! Mail, the new Hotmail (Windows Live Hotmail), and Gmail, who needs an email client these days?  All three major web-based email products have done an incredible job making Javascript in the browser act like an email client.  Yet, there are a few key reasons that so many people (like me) opt to use an email client today.  

I would like to see someone build a peer-to-peer email system which combines all of the functionality of Outlook and Exchange in a distributed client model — similar to what Skype has done with VOIP and IM, but for email, contacts, and calendaring.  Perhaps you could start with Eudora now that Qualcomm has said that they are going to open source one of the best email clients of all time?  Or perhaps you could just build on Thunderbird as Songbird has done with the browser?

One of the reasons why P2P worked so well with Skype is that users have an incentive to keep the client open all day — they want to receive messages.  Continuous client operation in a P2P system increases the resources for the network relative to applications which are running only while being used.  Email also benefits from being left open all day (either the client or the tab in the browser for web-based mail).

P2P email advantages.

1.  Your personal Exchange server.

During registration users would have the option of getting a new email address with our domain, picking a web-based email vendor (as long as they have IMAP/POP), or using their own domain (e.g., laserlike.com).  They could create as many email addresses as they would like (joe@laserlike.com, jane@laserlike.com, etc), as well as control their own mailing lists, their own directories, and do anything else that you can do with Exchange.

2. Disconnected use.

When I hop on a flight, I love to use the downtime to crank through my inbox.  Today, you simply cannot offer the power of Outlook + Exchange through the web browser when disconnected.  Yahoo! recently announced that the Zimbra client would integrate with Yahoo! Mail, which is a very smart move by Yahoo! — but it’s still a client.  And you can get free access to Gmail’s POP/IMAP features with any POP/IMAP client, like Apple Mail.  Yahoo! offers the POP/IMAP service to any client for a premium (the iPhone is an exception — it’s free) and Microsoft has no such offering for any price.   

You must have a client of some sort to have access to email when you are disconnected from the Internet.  A secondary benefit of a client is caching — even when you do have Internet access, the client offers a better experience as variations in the quality of a connection are smoothed out for the consumer by a client.  

3.  Availability.

Related to the first point is the notion of being able to have access to my email whenever I want it.  While web-based email systems are amongst the most reliable applications in the world, they do experience downtime.  And when they are down, you cannot get anything!  With a client, if your service provider is down (corporate Exchange or web-based mail), at least you can access the most recent snapshot of your email, address book, and calendar.  If your computer crashes, there is always a copy on the server which can be accessed through a web-based interface (for Exchange or web-based mail) from another computer.  With a client, you get an extra layer of protection (or several if you have a computer, blackberry, and web-based access to your email server).  It’s highly unlikely that you would experience failure on your computer, Blackberry, and your email server simultaneously.

4.  Security.

If you are using Outlook connected to your company’s Exchange server, there is a good chance that everything you do is archived forever.  Archiving software like Symantec’s KVS product even keeps copies of emails that are deleted by the user and allows executives to “mine” employee data without notification.  The major web-based players are required to turn over data if they are subpoenaed – again, you may not even know that your email is being reviewed.  On a national level, certain governments may also review email communications for other reasons. 

A P2P system could be built that would encrypt all communications so that nobody could retrieve your communications without your permission (or at least your knowledge, if the requesting party is armed).

The flip-side of the cloud computing coin is that everything you do can be retrieved without your knowledge — I wonder what happens when the government subpoenas Salesforce.com for a customer’s records?  Are they even permitted to notify them?  If they have Siebel installed, at least the authority making the request must approach the subpoenaed party.

5.  Large files.  

When you want to send a really large file, email often doesn’t work.  With our system, you can email files of any size.  In fact, we will use client-side deduping, which will allow for very fast “transfer” of large files which are common.  Forget YouSendIt, we’ll send it for you.

6.  Search.

It’s amazing to me that client-side (Outlook in particular) search is still so bad after all of this time.  Our client will include a PST “sniffer” which will find all Outlook files on a client and ingest them into our P2P client.  We will then index the mail and make wicked fast search.  We will also allow users to ingest all web-based mail for a complete search experience.  You don’t need Google Desktop, our system will handle search for you.

As I noted earlier this week, there are many opportunities in the email space.  While Thunderbird has lagged Firefox in adoption, it still has 67 million downloads – and that’s an okay a client.  A P2P email client-server combination with some of the features I suggested has the potential to make a bigger dent in the >1.2 billion user market.